This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of . http://dolearchives.ku.edu

ROBERT J. DOLE ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

Interview with

LEWIS L. (“LEW”) FERGUSON

April 19, 2007

Interviewer

Brien R. Williams

Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics 2350 Petefish Drive Lawrence, KS 66045 Phone: (785) 864-4900 Fax: (785) 864-1414

This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Ferguson 4-19-07—p. 2

[Lew Ferguson reviewed this transcript for accuracy of names and dates. Because no changes of substance were made, it is an accurate rendition of the original recording.]

Williams: This is an oral history interview with Lew Ferguson for the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas. We’re in the Dole Institute in Lawrence, Kansas, and today is Thursday, April 19, 2007, and I’m Brien Williams. Lew, let’s start a little bit with your background.

Ferguson: Well, I’m a native Oklahoman, two degrees in journalism from the University of Oklahoma, and after a couple of years working on a medium-sized daily newspaper in Oklahoma, I went to work for the Associated Press in 1960 in Oklahoma City, and my AP career took me to Sioux Falls, South Dakota; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Kansas City, Missouri, and Topeka, Kansas. The first ten years of my career with the AP, I was a sports writer for them at the major league level in Minneapolis and Kansas City. In 1970 I went to Topeka as a correspondent in charge of the AP Statehouse Bureau in Topeka, covering government and politics, elections, courts, all of it, and in those twenty-nine years in Topeka I covered all of Senator Dole’s elections from 1974 onward. I didn’t arrive until 1970, and he was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1968, two years before I arrived on the scene. I retired in July 1999, and in retirement I served one four-year term on the Kansas Board of Regents as an appointee of former Governor Bill [William P.] Graves, and I did not seek a second term because my wife very badly wanted to move in retirement back to our native Oklahoma, and we did that in 2005. Since then I’ve lived in retirement in my old hometown of Ponca City, Oklahoma.

Williams: So what was that change like, going from sports writing to political coverage?

Ferguson: Well, I’ve joked over the years that it was a pretty natural transition, really, going from covering athletes and sports to covering politicians and government. A lot of the same verbs apply in both fields, and actually my undergraduate work at the This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Ferguson 4-19-07—p. 3

University of Oklahoma was in government and politics, because back in my undergraduate days I had in my mind I might go to law school, so I was prepared to go to law school, but I never went that direction. I went into journalism instead.

Williams: Looking back on your career, was that a good choice?

Ferguson: [laughs] I don’t know. Most attorneys made more money than I made, but a lot of them didn’t, and I know a lot of attorneys in state agencies and state government who didn’t make very much money. But, no, I wouldn’t trade anything. I got into writing sports because I wanted to be an athlete and I wasn’t nearly good enough, and the second best thing was writing about sports, and that’s what got me into journalism. I realized one dream of covering sports at the major league level, and, frankly, got burned out on that after a while. We had two small children, and the opportunity came along to get out of sports writing and go into government and political reporting, so I took that opportunity. The only regret I guess I have is that I never worked in Washington, D.C. I’ve visited there, of course, and visited the AP bureau there, but the opportunity never came up with the AP to go in there for a year or two. That’s what I wanted to do once upon a time, but the AP didn’t agree with my theory that we could have been better State House reporters if we had had a little bit of Washington experience.

Williams: Were you asked to go to Topeka, or did you apply for that position?

Ferguson: Well, the AP personnel manager at the time wanted me to go into New York and become assistant sports editor of the AP in New York. We had children at the time, two and four years old, and my wife and I would not take them into that atmosphere, so as an alternative, they said, “Well, the Statehouse correspondency is open in Topeka. What would you think about that?” And so I accepted that.

Williams: Having stayed there, other than the fact that you wanted to take a year in Washington, that was a good assignment, Topeka?

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Ferguson: Oh, absolutely. It’s one of the absolute plum assignments in the wire services in my time there. Of course, I feel like I was in the golden age of print journalism in the United States, because, as we all know, newspapers are struggling and they may continue to struggle. While the AP supplies news to everybody, newspapers, radio, and television, I came out of the print side of it and that’s the softest part in my heart is for newspapers and the print side of journalism.

Williams: Is there any particular reason for that? Just nostalgia or anything else?

Ferguson: You got to write longer stories than the brief two seconds they get in a television report. [laughs] That sounds like I’m making fun of it, but there’s some truth in that. You can write analysis and you can dig deeper into stories than three or four sentences. Too many of my television colleagues complained a lot over the years about that was the big drawback to covering government and politics for television, is you just simply don’t have time to get into any depth and really explain a story, unless you’re working for NPR [National Public Radio] and then they have much longer pieces they can get into.

Williams: So you were aware of Senator Dole before you took the assignment in 1970, I would imagine.

Ferguson: Oh yes. In the fall of 1968 when he was elected to his first term in the Senate, I was already living in Merriam, Kansas, which is a suburb of Kansas City, Missouri, on the Kansas side. That’s where we lived while I was a Big Eight sportswriter in the Kansas City Bureau. We lived on the Kansas side and I voted in that Kansas election in 1968. Even back in those years when I was writing sports, I would pay attention, at least cursory attention, to candidates for public office so I could vote halfway intelligently. So, yes, I was aware of Senator Dole. I didn’t know a lot about him, but I knew he had run for the Senate and got elected.

Williams: So what was your first encounter with the senator?

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Ferguson: The has an annual get-together at Topeka called Kansas Day, and it’s celebrated on the anniversary of Kansas entering into statehood in 1861. Both parties have annual meetings like this, and the Republicans call theirs Kansas Day, and it’s on the last weekend in January each year. My first time I met Senator Dole, I’m sure was at one of those Kansas Day gatherings either in like 1971 or ’72.

Williams: Just as a footnote, what do the Democrats call their—

Ferguson: Washington Day.

Williams: So what were your impressions of Senator Dole prior to the 1974 election campaign?

Ferguson: Well, he struck me as very competent, very ambitious, and already developing into a very battle-seasoned, tough politician. He had served as chairman of the National Republican Party during the Watergate episode, and I was aware of that. We had done stories about him when he came back, interviews with him and whatnot. I knew—and it was borne out later—that he faced a very tough reelection in 1974. I will tell you that in either late ’73 or early ’74, his campaign was considered to be somewhat disorganized, and he was fending off media and Democratic allegations that somehow he might have known about Watergate or even been involved in Watergate in some way. Proved not to be true, but those were the accusations swirling around. Matter of fact, one of his nemesis was an attorney from Hays, Kansas, named Norbert Dreiling, who was chairman of the Kansas Democratic Party. Norbert was a brilliant attorney and a great political strategist, and Norbert had a fantastic knack for hitting Republicans where it hurt, with his verbal barbs. One of his rumors he tried to start—and to this day I don’t know whether he was serious about it or was just something he threw out there, but he started the rumor that the Watergate break-in tools had been found in Dole’s apartment in the Watergate. Dole lived in the Watergate. Of course, it wasn’t true. At least to this day to my knowledge there was nothing to it. But backing up a bit, Dole knew that he faced a tough reelection because of the baggage of Watergate, and the [Richard M.] Nixon presidency had pulled the Republican This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Ferguson 4-19-07—p. 6

Party down. So through an intermediary who happened to be Alf [Alfred M.] Landon—I don’t know how much that name means to people nowadays, but Alf was a two-term governor of Kansas in the mid-thirties and was the Republican nominee for president in 1936, and Alf had sort of latched onto the AP correspondents for years, to maintain contact with them so he could find out what we knew was going on in Kansas politics. So I sort of inherited that, and we hit it off well. For the last seventeen years of his life— he died in 1987, a month past his 100th birthday--and for the last seventeen years of his life we went to lunch almost weekly, Alf and I did, and he was always pumping me for information in the political arena. His great delight was if he found out something before I did so he could tell me about it, and he would chortle about that and rub it in. Anyway, through Alf, I was approached to go to work for , and Bob himself called me from Washington during this process. I indicated from the get-go that I didn’t think I was very interested for the big reason was, I wasn’t willing to give up an AP career and the security of that to go to work for a politician who might lose the next election, and then where are you? So anyway, I ultimately turned them down, but Bob himself called me from Washington, I wouldn’t say really trying to talk me into it, as it were. He was more explaining what the duties would be and that he would like to have me and that sort of thing. But Bob was the type of person, at least in those days, that didn’t beg anybody to do anything. He was much more likely to tell people what to do than he was to ask people. [laughs] Anyway, a funny aside to that story is that Alf had a very fertile mind, bright guy. By this time he was well into his eighties, but he still maintained a very active mind and he read widely, he read two or three papers a day, and he would do some book reading, not a lot, but mainly he kept up with current events, and he knew and I knew that a little weekly newspaper northwest of Topeka in a town called St. Mary’s, the weekly newspaper was for sale, so Alf concocted this idea that I should get Dole to finance the down payment out of campaign funds, or I don’t know where—it never got that far—and buy that paper, let me buy that paper and then work for Bob, and I would have that to fall back on for a career if Bob got beat. This came out of Alf’s fertile mind. Of course, nothing ever came of it and I told Bob I appreciated the offer and considered it a compliment, but I wasn’t prepared to abandon an AP career. And he went on and ran for reelection in 1974 and got reelected. This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Ferguson 4-19-07—p. 7

Williams: Do you think there was in Alf’s mind or in the senator’s mind that having you on board would be sort of damage control in terms of his difficulties with Watergate and so forth?

Ferguson: I think there was some element of that. We only had one conversation by telephone one-on-one. Other intermediaries also talked to me about it, but I only talked to the senator once about it. I got the impression that he thought I could lend credibility to his reelection campaign because the AP had a high degree of credibility in Kansas. Almost every newspaper subscribed, were clients of the AP, and most the radio and television stations, and by that time, after three years in Kansas, I guess I was fairly well known, or he and Alf thought so. Plus I think he thought I was competent and I could do his speechwriting. He mentioned speechwriting and helping flesh out issues, just kind of keeping an ear to the ground, keep him out of trouble, and maybe come up with some ideas how he could overcome this stigma of Watergate. I don’t know how much I would have helped him or hurt him. I will never know. But that was my impression after talking to him and Alf an others, of why he wanted me to go to work for him.

Williams: I don’t want to overemphasize hindsight and whatnot, but looking back on that opportunity that was placed before you, do you regret not having gone with the senator?

Ferguson: No, not at all. And I’ll be candid with you. I don’t think I could have worked for Bob Dole back in those days. I knew staffers of his, and there were times he was extremely hard on them. A young man who—I guess he was about my age at the time, named Bob Minor worked for Senator Dole in those days, and he told me some stories of things that happened on the inside that affected Bob’s relationship to his staff that I don’t think I would have lasted long. I would have just walked away from it, and that was a big factor in me turning him down.

Williams: By this time, or maybe from the start, you were getting front-page byline articles on political issues.

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Ferguson: Oh yes, yes.

Williams: So you were well known in the community.

Ferguson: I got a lot better known later because I became, frankly, something of a—I stayed so long, you become a legend when you stay as long as I did. We never intended to stay in Topeka that long. I never intended to stay in that job that long, but our two children grew up there and my wife went back to teaching school there, and we just never left until after retirement.

Williams: Before we get a little deeper into the 1974 campaign, during the period ’70 to ’74, did you have many one-on-one opportunities with Senator Dole?

Ferguson: They would have been brief, or interviews when he came back. He didn’t come back to visit Kansas a great deal, and especially after the ’74 campaign it was rare for him to be back here, because as he worked his way up the Senate ladder, he had a pretty safe seat and he didn’t have to come back here very much to maintain contact. He had a very loyal Republican constituency, and he knew that. He just didn’t have to work it very much. Now, when he would come back for this Kansas Day event, as I’ve told you, he was very friendly, gregarious, greeting everybody, and by and large, that Republican constituency loved him. I mean, they highly respected him and they liked him.

Williams: Did you do much interviewing of Kansans about their attitudes towards the senator?

Ferguson: Some. Not a great deal. I traveled, made a couple of campaign trips during that ’74 campaign, and I would ask people who came to his or Congressman [Bill] Roy’s campaign events, I would ask the people who were there, but the problem with that kind of interview is that those people are there because they like his candidacy. You’re not going to get any, quote, dirt on them or anything negative. But I don’t recall—well, I know I didn’t—like I didn’t set out and take a grand tour of the state to test the public This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Ferguson 4-19-07—p. 9 water and feel the public pulse of what they thought about Senator Dole. There was polling in those days, you know, and I’m sure you’ve picked up from others that Senator Dole trailed in that polling almost the entire way. In fact, Congressman Roy went into the final weekend with a three- or four-point lead, and fell off the table the last three days.

Williams: Before we talk a lot more about that, can you generalize on the kind of press Dole was getting in the period ’70 to ’74? Was it just uniformly positive or were there pockets of resistance?

Ferguson: There was a chain of newspapers mainly in Southwest Kansas called the Harris chain, after the gentleman who had founded the chain, anchored by the Hutchinson News, and they were probably the most critical of Dole, not that they went out of their way to criticize him, but I think you asked about was there universal praise of him or not, and, no, I think it was mostly positive. What questioning there was of Dole’s role behind the scenes of running the Republican Party during the Watergate episode would have come probably from editorials mainly in the Harris papers and a famous old editor and publisher of the Parson’s Sun named Clyde [M.] Reed. Clyde could be critical of Dole. Clyde was a Republican and he supported Dole, but if he thought Bob had a smear of mustard on his face, he would editorialize about it.

Williams: Were there some Democratic-leaning papers in the state at that time?

Ferguson: One. One alone. The Junction City Daily Union, whose publisher was John D. Montgomery, and the reason I emphasize the initial is his son was John G. Montgomery, so we always used the middle initial to distinguish between them. In fact, his son John Gray Montgomery, is still the publisher to this day of the Junction City Union. But the older gentleman, John David Montgomery, was a big Democrat, and that was the only paper back in those days that had a decided Democratic leaning, of the daily newspapers. Now, I couldn’t comment on the weekly newspapers; I didn’t pay enough attention to them.

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Williams: So share with me your recollections of the 1974 campaign.

Ferguson: Well, like others, I think it did ultimately turn on the abortion issue. I could be wrong, but in my mind that was maybe the first statewide election, perhaps in the United States, in which the abortion issue was that big a deciding hot-button issue. It later became, of course, all over the country. It had not been much of an issue in Kansas up till then. The had passed a law in 1970 allowing abortions under certain conditions. For example, three doctors had to agree that the abortion was necessary for the life and health of the mother. That later got struck down by the courts, who said they only needed one doctor to make that determination. So abortion wasn’t unknown in Kansas until ’74, but it had gradually grown, and Kansas Right-to-Life in those days was the primary anti-abortion organization in the state, and they just came to prominence in that period leading up to the 1974 election, between ’70 and ’74. I’m sure they had been organized before 1970, but nobody heard much or paid much attention to them. I would say like in September or October of that ’74 campaign, literature started appearing, primarily in the form of flyers placed on the windshields of cars at churches, evangelical churches around the state and Catholic churches, accusing Bill Roy, who was a physician, OB/GYN, and some of this literature was pretty raw—pictures of fetuses in plastic bags, for example. I can remember at a news conference, probably sometime in late September, early October, asking Senator Dole what he thought about this, and giving him every opportunity to either repudiate it or distance himself from it, and his response was, “I have no control over what a third-party group like this does.” So he would neither renounce it, nor repudiate it. He didn’t say, “I condone it. I encourage it,” or anything, but he certainly didn’t repudiate it, and steadfastly maintained that he and his campaign were behind it in no way whatsoever. But it certainly benefited him, and as the campaign drumbeat quickened in October, in my recollection, the Kansas Right-to-Life became more and more vocal and anti-Roy, as a matter of fact, painting him by word of mouth and behind the scenes as being one of the state’s leading abortionists. In fact, he was not, as I’m sure he told you. I don’t’ want to characterize what he did. He may have performed a few abortions and there may have been others performed in the partnership This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Ferguson 4-19-07—p. 11 in which he was involved in Topeka, but certainly in my mind he wasn’t an abortionist, but that’s the way they painted him. As I mentioned, Dole trailed in the polling almost that entire campaign, and it wasn’t only the abortion issue that beat Roy, in my opinion. It was the fact that he was on the liberal side as far as Kansas politics are concerned, and that certainly played into it. Bill had both degrees in medicine and law, and he would tout that. It’s been my experience in politics that the more you advertise and emphasize how highly educated and how brilliant you are, the more you go down with voters. Voters like people like themselves, and after my years of observation, people vote overwhelmingly how they feel about a person. You have 30 percent that are going to support Senator Dole no matter what, or whatever the percentage is. You’re going to have 30 percent who wouldn’t vote for him for dog catcher, as the old saying goes. And it’s the 40 percent in the middle who aren’t that passionate one way or the other, and my observation, they overwhelmingly vote the likeability factor, and issues mean very little to them, I don’t think. Or as long as they’re not a hunter and some candidate saying, “I’m going to take all the shotguns and rifles away from the hunters,” then they’re going to oppose the guy. So Roy’s personality played into it, and the abortion thing, but the abortion thing, in my opinion, was really what tipped the scales finally in Dole’s favor.

Williams: Following your line of reasoning here, Dole must then have looked much more familiar and likeable to people.

Ferguson: Well, I don’t know about likeability, but he certainly came across as more in tune with a majority of Kansans politically, where they were on the . Bob Dole didn’t come across as an extreme conservative. By today’s standards he was really middle-of-the-road. Back then he was considered conservative, and I think he called himself conservative, but Bill Roy was so much more. The contrast was obvious between Bob Dole the conservative and Bill Roy the liberal, and I think in the final analysis, a lot of these swing voters in the middle just came down on the side that Bill Roy was just a little too liberal for them. Then the abortion thing swung some others.

Williams: How did the Vietnam War play out in that campaign? This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Ferguson 4-19-07—p. 12

Ferguson: Don’t remember it ever being an issue, in all honesty. Don’t remember it. Well, didn’t it end right after Nixon resigned in ’74? In August ’74.

Williams: Dr. Roy had said that he’d been fairly outspoken in his opposition to the war, so I just wondered if that came up, too.

Ferguson: I have no recollection of Congressman Roy making that—certainly not a central issue in his campaign, and in my mind I don’t even remember it being a major issue. Now, I could be wrong, and I’ll stand corrected. If Bill said it, I won’t quarrel with him.

Williams: Was it a surprise that he became the Democratic nominee?

Ferguson: No. You’ve got to remember the minority status of Democrats in Kansas. First place, the number of Democratic congressmen you can name in this state’s history, you can put on two hands, maybe one. I’d have to tally them up. And they’ve never had a Democratic senator from Kansas. So a sitting Democratic congressman running for the U.S. Senate was entirely logical, and I don’t think Bill even had a primary opponent. If he did, it was somebody so minor that they had no chance against him. Democrats in general in Kansas had very few political stars, and therefore very seldom do they have a major primary fight over any statewide or congressional nomination. There have been a handful, but not very often do they, and there was nobody in the Democratic Party, if Bill Roy wanted to run for U.S. Senate, there was nobody going to challenge him for it.

Williams: What was his reputation like as a representative?

Ferguson: I think it was solid. He defeated a longtime congressman from Atchison, Kansas, which is way up in the northeast corner of the state, like fifty, sixty, seventy miles north of Kansas City, who got complacent, didn’t run a very good campaign, thought he could just announce he was running for reelection and that was that. And Bill sort of snuck up on him and beat him in 1970. It was a big surprise when this incumbent This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Ferguson 4-19-07—p. 13 got beat. Bill had good constituent services, he came back, he paid attention to the district, and I think he was in pretty good stead with Second District voters by the time he ran for the , but I don’t think he was very well known at all around the rest of the state. In the big voter blocs of Wichita and suburban Kansas City, I don’t think he was very well known, and that probably hurt him. But I’d have to go back and check the figures to see how well he did against Senator Dole in those two big voting areas, population areas.

Williams: Did any newspaper in the state take on the issue of the abortion pamphlets and so forth? Did that become controversial?

Ferguson: A couple of the Harris papers, Hutchinson and I think Salina took note of it, but I have no recollection of the Kansas City Star or the Wichita Eagle or the Topeka paper editorializing that this was good, bad, or indifferent, this abortion issue raising its head. I’ll be frank with you, other reporters even for the Wichita Eagle and Kansas City Star virtually ignored that issue. They just didn’t pick up on it coming down the stretch.

Williams: I recall Roe v. Wade had occurred in 1973, so that gave some background to this, but still it was not a hot issue from the viewpoint of the press?

Ferguson: Not in their minds it wasn’t, and to this day I don’t know why. But the AP emphasized it much more than newspapers did, and that’s the reason Senator Dole wasn’t very happy with me personally or with the AP in general, because we were reporting about this issue and that he wouldn’t disavow himself of their tactics. As a matter of fact, election night, I and my colleagues covering the election, we were in Kansas City, Missouri, because those were the infancy days of computerized vote tallying, and the Kansas Secretary of State’s office wasn’t computerized yet; they still counted votes the old-fashioned way of a county clerk calling in when all the votes were counted and adding them up on a tablet, and we computerized it. We were in Kansas City because that’s where the computer was that the AP used. So after Senator Dole finally won and he was making a victory statement at the downtown Ramada [Inn] in Topeka, a victory statement to his followers who were there This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Ferguson 4-19-07—p. 14 and the press people who were there, and I called to get a reaction from him. And whoever answered the phone—I was told these were his exact words—“If that’s Lew Ferguson, hang up.” [laughs] So I never got any comment out of him that night.

Williams: You said the AP was picking up on the abortion issue. Who was running their stories?

Ferguson: I was, most of them. And we didn’t write it every day, but when we would write from some event, I would throw in there that this was an issue and that the Right-to- Life—because there was no disclaimer on their flyers that they put on the windshields. They signed “Kansas Right-to-Life” on it. There wasn’t anything subversive about it; they were open about it that they were doing it and they were doing it to defeat Bill Roy.

Williams: And this story wasn’t being picked up in other parts of the country?

Ferguson: Well, the AP papers would carry our stuff. No, the other parts of the country, no. I wasn’t in other parts of the country, but I don’t think—nobody focused on the senatorial election in Kansas. Bob Dole hadn’t risen to that level yet in the Republican Senate hierarchy to where they would pay that much attention to Kansas. Now, later, of course, in 1980 and ’86, Dole had only just the most token opposition. They would mention that, yes, Senator Dole won another six years, but that would be about it. Nobody came out here and covered the campaign or anything, and we didn’t cover it near like ’74 was probably the biggest campaign in my years in Topeka.

Williams: But it was not notable outside of Kansas?

Ferguson: Not to my knowledge, no. Our New York and Washington people didn’t call out here and say, “How’s that race between Dole and Roy going, and what are the issues?” There was none of that like there was in later years.

Williams: There was another issue used against Roy, and that was the AWOL charge. Do you have any comments on that? This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Ferguson 4-19-07—p. 15

Ferguson: AWOL from what? I don’t remember that.

Williams: The claim was that he was AWOL on veterans matters.

Ferguson: Oh, okay, okay. I didn’t know what issue you were referring to. Well, yes, Dole used that, of course, because of his strong support and his interest in veterans issues. I don’t know, maybe Bill thinks it was a big issue. Thinking back in my mind, it was an issue, but it wasn’t a big issue, to my mind. The big issues was how liberal is Bill Roy and how many abortions has he or has he not performed. I’m trying to think if there’s any—those were by far the two overwhelming issues in that campaign, in my judgment.

Williams: Dr. Roy emphasizes the abortion issue, but maybe doesn’t agree with you on the other matter?

Ferguson: I guess if he says they attacked him for being AWOL on veterans issues, I’ll take his word for it, but I do not remember that being a major issue.

Williams: The next big Dole story is he was the vice presidential candidate. Any recollections about that?

Ferguson: Oh yes. Oh yes. Well, Dole declared for president in 1988 in his hometown of Russell, Kansas.

Williams: I’m asking you about the ’76 run as [Gerald R.] Ford’s vice presidential candidate.

Ferguson: Right. Okay. My recollection of that is, nobody expected him to pick Dole, to my knowledge. Nobody expected him to pick—and I certainly did not. The Convention was virtually over and I was down in the basement of the Muehlebach Hotel in Kansas City buying some Convention memorabilia for my children when I saw one of This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Ferguson 4-19-07—p. 16 the vendors had a little TV set there and I saw on there he’s picked Bob Dole. I wasn’t even at the Convention Center. Of course, nobody else was either because this announcement came from another hotel down on the Plaza. So I gulped hard and I thought, my gosh, where’d I better go? Well, I went to where the Kansas delegation was staying at actually kind of a seedy motel down by the river north of the downtown area, so I went there to see who was around to get reaction from them, because I knew no reporter was going to—maybe some of the top dogs from the networks and the AP and UPI [United Press International] might get invited up to interview Dole or whatever, but I certainly wasn’t going to as a correspondent from Topeka. So I went and, sure enough, found Dole’s sister and his daughter Robin were at the motel, and they didn’t even know it yet. So I broke the news to them and got comments from them, and of course they thought that was great. Then that night convention reconvened and formally nominated Dole, and then I was asked to go on the campaign trail and cover him as part of the AP team. I declined because I knew what those guys went through that followed those candidates. Boy, you talk about a grinder. You’re handed a prepared speech on the plane; you call in a few quotes; you get there; you never have time to call back in. If he deviates from the speech, you’re back on the plane. It’s the awfullest rat race in the world. I think presidential races, I think some of that has been modified with the fact that everybody has laptops and everything and they can write while the plane’s flying from Point A to Point B. Back in those days, you had to call stuff in and you had to wait till the plane landed and you found a pay phone or whatever. Anyway, I declined to go on that ’76 campaign following Dole.

Williams: Did Dole make any or some visits to the state during that campaign?

Ferguson: I don’t think so, any more than in ’96 when he was awarded the nomination, he never came to see the Kansas delegation in San Diego. You’ll get to that later.

Williams: So the next race was in 1980, when John Simpson was the opponent, the Democrat. What was that like?

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Ferguson: John Simpson had been a Republican all his life, served in the State Senate as a Republican, but he didn’t like Bob Dole. He was very liberal for a Republican, and he didn’t like Bob at all, and nobody else was stepping up to the plate, so he switched parties and ran as a Democrat against Bob. Of course, he had virtually no chance because he was painted as a turncoat Republican going after one of the heroes of the Kansas Republican Party. John was a nice guy, very bright guy, but he never had a prayer from the get-go, given his background of being a converted Republican.

Williams: Of course, that was Dr. Roy, too, wasn’t it.

Ferguson: Yes, yes, but Roy had done it some time before he ran against Dole.

Williams: In 1985 Dole became the Republican Leader.

Ferguson: In the Senate.

Williams: He was elected in ’84, took office in ’85. How did that play in Kansas?

Ferguson: Well, got great coverage, of course, out here, and Kansans, especially Republicans, were elated that they had had a favorite son ascend to that. It put him in the category with Dwight [D.] Eisenhower and probably put him in a higher category than because Alf got beat so badly. So it just elevated him to forever one of the icons of the Kansas Republican Party.

Williams: The next race was in ’86 against an opponent, Guy McDonald.

Ferguson: Yes. An absolute zero. I don’t mean to malign the guy, but the only reason he won the Democrat primary was his name, because the McDonald franchise, the restaurants. People recognized the McDonald name, you know, it rang a bell. I can’t tell you now who the other candidates were, but they were equally nondescript, unknown in the political world, and he won, in my opinion, strictly because his name was McDonald.

This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Ferguson 4-19-07—p. 18

Williams: Did you or any of the other journalists cover the Democratic primary?

Ferguson: To no degree whatsoever, because we’d covered other things, governor’s race and what have you, because that race was decided before it began.

Williams: Just to finish off here, in 1992 it was Gloria O’Dell. What comments do you have about that?

Ferguson: Well, Gloria kind of came out of the blue to run for it. She really didn’t have much—she had some credentials of having worked in the Democratic Party, but she had no other political credentials. She had worked for nonprofit organizations, as I recall, and was active in women’s issues, and here again it’s simply because there wasn’t anybody else, anybody of any stature in the Democratic Party that wanted to take on Bob Dole. So she did it, and she thought she could get the women’s vote and maybe people were fed up with Bob Dole, but she never stood a chance. She made some allegations against him that kind of, I think, upset him or made him mad, but it was like an elephant flipping a fly off his back. [laughs]

Williams: Let’s turn to some of the issues that Senator Dole was dealing with in Washington, both as a member of the Senate and as the Leader. Were some of those big issues out here? I would suspect farm policy would be.

Ferguson: Yes, farm policy is always a big issue in Kansas. By that stage of the game, as far as the AP’s concerned, we had a regional reporter for the AP who covered only Kansas and Missouri back there, and he concentrated on those issues as Senator Dole was dealing with them, more than we were in the Topeka bureau. We touched on them virtually only when Senator Dole visited back here. We covered the legislature and state government, and unless it was a campaign, we left for this regional reporter who in those years was a young man named Barry Massey, who had started with the AP with me here in Topeka, and later became the Statehouse correspondent in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Barry would have covered Dole in those years.

This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Ferguson 4-19-07—p. 19

Williams: Did Dole develop the reputation for being more a national figure and less representative of Kansas’ interests?

Ferguson: Well, I’m not to say he ignored Kansas issues, but he very much—very much—became a national figure and less and less needed to pay much attention to things back home, and certainly didn’t need to pay much attention to the Kansas press anymore. He was above that. He was a national figure dealing with national media, and only when he came back here for some special occasion did we even have any contact with him.

Williams: So if he’s coming back less often, were his public appearances in the state then more significant or bigger affairs?

Ferguson: No, I wouldn’t say they changed much. When he would come back to Kansas, he was always a star at this Kansas Day observance each year at the end of January, and he remained a star and probably was even a bigger star the higher he moved in the Republican Senate hierarchy. He was Minority Leader first. He never was Majority Leader, was he?

Williams: Yes.

Ferguson: What year did he become Majority Leader?

Williams: In the [Ronald W.] Reagan years and then ’94 to ’96 he was Majority Leader again.

Ferguson: That’s right. Anyway, you can see my memory of him in Washington is a little hazy because I didn’t cover him back there. But he was very much the national figure. Kansans, especially Republicans, were very, very proud of him and the powerful position he had in Washington, and they were very, very proud when he won the nomination to be the Republican nominee for president.

Williams: Did you cover many of his visits to Russell? This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Ferguson 4-19-07—p. 20

Ferguson: Only when he made announcements. I don’t remember him going—when he made trips out to Russell, generally they were unpublicized. We would find out about them after the fact, that he popped in to visit his family, but I don’t have a recollection of him going back to Russell very many times. He and Gerald Ford flew to Russell from the Kansas City convention and then Dole announced there, made his formal announcement there in ’88. In ’96 he made his formal announcement here in Topeka, then went to Russell after that, but, no, those are the only times I ever covered him in Russell.

Williams: All right. We’ve come to the end of this tape, so I’m going to stop for a moment here.

[Beginning of Tape 2.] Were there times when Kansans were fed up with Bob Dole on any particular issue or where he didn’t quite come across as meeting their aspirations?

Ferguson: Well, I’m sure Democrats could cite you any number of issues, but I don’t recall any that stirred up the Republican base, that got him crosswise with the Republican base. He would be involved in things that would be important to Kansas. The farm bill. veterans issues, he was always very strong on those, and Kansans recognized that. He succeeded in any number of instances in acquiring funding for buildings and programs, and succeeded in the early to mid-nineties in getting several regional offices of federal agencies relocated from Kansas City, Missouri, to Kansas City, Kansas. There’s a brand- new—well, it’s not new now, but there’s a newer Federal Courthouse Building in Kansas City, Kansas, that bears his name, and he secured the funding for that.

Williams: At one point there was the issue of the sale of wheat to the Soviet Union, and it’s my understanding that kind of cut two different ways. One, why are we feeding Communists? So we’re against it. On the other hand, what are we doing with our wheat? Here’s a major market. How did that play out in the state?

This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Ferguson 4-19-07—p. 21

Ferguson: It plays out very simply. It’s black and white. You sell wheat to anybody you can sell it to. No, I remember there was a debate over it, but the bottom line is, the Kansas wheat farmers are much more concerned about their economic wellbeing than they are about international politics, and I don’t think very many people were upset that we—they would love to sell more wheat to Cuba today, for example, than they’re able to. When American beef gets shut out of the Japanese market as it has in recent years over the Mad Cow [Disease] issue, that’s very upsetting in Kansas, and they want to remove any obstacle to selling these agricultural products.

Williams: What is the balance between agribusiness and the small farm here in Kansas? What’s the proportion, just generally?

Ferguson: Well, in general Kansas probably has as high a percentage of small, quote, family farmers as any agricultural state, but they’re continually diminishing and the giant farms increase. Many of them in Kansas are family-owned. I mean, there are families and individual wheat growers in western Kansas that either own or control by lease millions of acres of land that they plant to wheat, and in that sense there are fewer family farmers, and Kansas has resisted the hog farm operations that you hear about that have caused controversy in places like North Carolina and now they’re causing controversy in Oklahoma, because Kansas would not allow one of the big pork-producing companies to set up shop in southwest Kansas, so they went across the border into the Panhandle of Oklahoma, and that has caused controversy down there, but corporate hog farming has not been allowed into Kansas, and that’s in defense of the family farm. There’s two sides to that issue. There are a lot of, quote, family farmers or small farm operations that would love to have contracts with these big pork-producing companies and sell their hogs to them, but we haven’t had much of that. There’s some contracting, my understanding is, in southwest Kansas now with the big operations that have located across the border in the Oklahoma Panhandle.

Williams: I’ve read somewhere that Bob Dole had really good relations with the man in charge of Archer Daniels Midland, Andreas. Was he a better friend to ADM than he was to the little family farm, or not? This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Ferguson 4-19-07—p. 22

Ferguson: I don’t know that I’m in a position to judge that. All I can tell you is that there are a lot of Kansans, especially Democrats, who think Bob Dole got into bed a little too much with ADM, and there were stories of ADM flying him around during campaigns and that sort of thing. I don’t know that any of it was proven, and not enough of it became public, to my knowledge. I have no knowledge of how strong his ties to ADM were, no personal knowledge, or what ADM may have done for him. I just don’t know. It never got public enough that we reported on it.

Williams: When Bill [William J.] Clinton became president, Dole was pretty sharp with him and really didn’t want him to succeed in any legislative way. Any comments on that?

Ferguson: Well, I suspect it’s because Bob had it a long time at least in the back of his mind to run for president himself. He had tried it in ’88, and then I think he anticipated trying it again, which indeed he did. So why would you want the person you’re going to challenge to succeed? That’s just the way the political game is played.

Williams: I’m going to bounce around a little bit with some questions here. How had Dole and Nancy Kassebaum, when they were both in the Senate, how did they work together or not work together? What was that like?

Ferguson: Well, for public consumption, I think they were very compatible, but behind the scenes I know there was a lot of friction between the two staffs. Senator Kassebaum’s staff and her chief of staff, a big part of her eighteen years there started out with me here in Topeka working for the AP, went to Washington with the AP and then Nancy hired him off the national staff of the AP. I know behind the scenes there was a lot of friction between the staffs. The Kassebaum staff always thought Dole and his people were extremely arrogant and tried to run over her. There was a judgeship came up in the late 1980s, and historically when a judgeship in Kansas came open, one senator would recommend the person, and when a new one came up, the other senator would recommend a person to the White House. This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Ferguson 4-19-07—p. 23

Well, in some Republicans’ minds and in Alf Landon’s mind—Nancy, of course, is Alf’s daughter, he’s very protective of her—in Alf’s mind and in some other Republicans’, it was Nancy’s, quote, turn, to recommend the next U.S. District Court judge to the White House. Well, Nancy had a nominee, whose name was [Judge] Tom VanBebber. He had worked on the U.S. Attorney’s staff; he’d served in the legislature; he’d been chairman of the Corporation Commission; he was a federal magistrate. I’m sorry, I’ve got to back up. This was before he became—he got the federal magistrate appointment as kind of a consolation prize. Anyway, to make a long story short, Dole stepped in and nominated an old law school classmate of his who had helped the senator get a divorce from his first wife, and indeed this other nominee, whose name was Sam Crow, who became a federal judge, and is still in emeritus status on the bench, he got the—well, Alf was infuriated, because in his mind, Dole had elbowed Nancy out of the way and, quote, stolen an appointment from her, and he wanted Nancy to go public and denounce Dole for doing this. That was never Nancy’s style. She wouldn’t have done that in a million years. Nancy always deferred to Bob on the theory that he was the senior senator, much higher in the Republican hierarchy than she was, and so she did nothing about it. Indeed, her nominee, Tom VanBebber, later became a federal judge and had Senator Dole’s support, the support of both senators when he got it.

Williams: So this may be an unfair question to ask, but did they get back into sequence in terms of terms later on, or not, do you recall?

Ferguson: Well, I don’t remember that we had any more nominees. Well, then there was a period in there when was president that you didn’t nominate a Republican because he wasn’t going to get nominated by President Clinton. So there were some Democrats in there, and I don’t remember that—I think in those instances I think it was more the party Democrats who had a stronger say in who got nominated than the two senators.

Williams: Dave Owen. What do you know about Dave Owen?

This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Ferguson 4-19-07—p. 24

Ferguson: [laughs] Well, I know quite a bit about Dave Owen. He was in the State Senate when I came to Topeka, got elected lieutenant governor back in the early seventies when we still elected the governor, lieutenant governor on separate tickets, and was very close to Senator Dole, worked for Senator Dole, was a major fundraiser for him, was a major colleague. I think Senator Dole relied on him a lot to keep things going smoothly back in Kansas while he was in Washington. In 1988, when Senator Dole first tried for the presidency, Dave Owen was his emissary in New Hampshire, and there was a lot of grumbling back home that they went up there and spent some campaign money they had raised out in Kansas in a lost cause. I know Republicans who were upset about that. Then Dave Owen remained a close confidant, to my knowledge, of Senator Dole, and had never worked on his staff, to my knowledge, but he worked behind the scenes and he certainly worked on his campaigns. Then the issue of parimutuel wagering came before the legislature, and Dave Owen—and I don’t know the background of how, but he tied up with Paul Bryant, Jr., the son of the legendary Alabama football coach Bear Bryant, and Paul Jr. was very interested, on behalf of himself and a consortium he had, of getting parimutuel wagering legalized in Kansas, a dog-racing track in the Kansas City, Kansas, area. He had tracks in Alabama, and he gave Dave Owen $100,000. This is all documented, reported, went to court, is a matter of court record. He gave Dave Owen $100,000, and Dave got himself into trouble by not reporting it on income tax of some companies he had influence over or controlled, and the upshot of it all was, Bob Dole washed his hands of Dave Owen because he didn’t want this budding scandal that close to him. Dave, indeed, served a year in prison, and Judge VanBebber, who I alluded to earlier, did the sentencing of him. He has long since served his term, and I don’t know what he’s doing now, but I know he’s back in some kind of business in the Kansas City area. But that’s my knowledge of what happened between him and Senator Dole. If things also happened personally between them, that they got into some kind of dispute, I’m not privy to that. All I know is that Dave Owen got himself into these legal problems, and Senator Dole just cut him off.

Williams: I thought there was some issue about Owen managing Elizabeth Dole’s trust fund. This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Ferguson 4-19-07—p. 25

Ferguson: There was indeed, and I’m hazy on the details of that because I don’t think much of that ever became public. It was never a court case, to my recollection. In my memory, that was more rumor and speculation than it was facts that we could report.

Williams: We sort of passed over the 1988 presidential campaign. Is there anything to say about that?

Ferguson: Well, I think out here in Kansas we mostly thought it was a nonstarter from the beginning, at least we in the press. I’m sure there were loyal Dole Republicans who got fired up about it and thought it was going somewhere, but I don’t think we in the press ever thought it would get very far, and indeed it collapsed in New Hampshire.

Williams: So why were conditions quite different by ’96?

Ferguson: Dole had built a major reputation as the Republican Leader of the Senate. He had run as a vice presidential nominee. Frankly—and I’ve heard other people say this—I think it was just Bob’s turn. Republicans used to be that way. It was whoever was next in line. I think that a lot of people in the party thought they owed it to Bob. The speculation was, and as it turned out it was true, that at that point in time Bill Clinton remained so popular that Bob really never had much of a chance.

Williams: Do you think he really wanted to be president?

Ferguson: Oh yes, I do. I do. I’ll go beyond that. I think he would have been a very good president. He was analytical, he was smart, he knew how to strike compromises in government. And that’s one of our big problems since, is the two factions are at loggerheads all the time in Washington. They can’t get anything done. Bob Dole knew how to strike compromises when it was required. Not that he wasn’t fiercely partisan; everybody knows he was. And yet he knew how to get along with the other side when something really needed to be done, and he knew the ways of Washington. Maybe he knew them too well, and maybe that was a strike against him. But a bigger strike was This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Ferguson 4-19-07—p. 26 that at that point in time Bill Clinton, in my judgment, was just too popular, and remains more popular since leaving office, despite what many considered he squandered in his presidency.

Williams: There’s always been the issue of the bad side of Bob Dole, the scowling, the angry, the quick-to-mouth-off kind of reputation. Is that an accurate reflection? Is that just a minor part of the character? How do you see that?

Ferguson: Bob Dole was a very tough politician who had fought his way up to lead his party in the United States Senate. He’s a very complex personality, and I don’t know how much his wartime experiences and his recovery from very severe wounds played into that and made him even a tougher personality than he was, but, yes, he could be very tough. He could even be mean-spirited, and it came out behind the scenes in a lot of ways. He could be short. In my dealings with him he never was what I would call nasty to me. He always treated me fairly, and he never cut me off, other than that one time where he told them to hang up on me. But we got along okay. We weren’t around each other that much, and anytime, like he was back here at a Kansas Day event or whatever, or in his office, there were a few times when he called me to his office because he had a story he wanted to get out. It was always cordial enough, but I doubt, with the possible exception of Elizabeth [Dole], I doubt Bob Dole has been a buddy of anybody in his adult life, since his wartime experience. He’s just always been distant, in my judgment. Now, there are people who tell you that’s all wrong, that he can be the warmest, nicest guy in the world. I’ve got to say I seldom, if ever, saw that side of him in my professional dealings with him.

Williams: So is it remarkable, in saying all that, that he has been such a successful politician?

Ferguson: Yes, it is remarkable. Of course, he’s always had a solid Republican base in Kansas that never turned on him, never wavered in their support of him, so he never had to really watch his hind flank like a lot of politicians have to do, especially those where the voter registration’s virtually a tossup or they’ve got potential tough opponents waiting This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Ferguson 4-19-07—p. 27 in the wings to take them on. Bob never really never had that. Other than Bill Roy, Bob Dole never really had a really tough campaign in Kansas, a knock-down drag-out like that ’74 campaign.

Williams: What would you estimate would have been the number of contacts over your professional career that you had with Senator Dole, just real ballpark figure?

Ferguson: Twenty-nine years. Oh, probably two or three a year, maybe four, for twenty- nine years. I suppose ballpark between eighty and a hundred.

Williams: One-on-ones?

Ferguson: No, no, just him making appearances here for a news conference, cornering him at an event to ask him questions, his announcements, that sort of thing. No, there wouldn’t be that many one-on-one. I wasn’t his reporter by any stretch of the imagination.

Williams: When was your last contact with him?

Ferguson: [laughs] The letter I received to do this interview was the last contact. But speaking?

Williams: Face-to-face?

Ferguson: Oh, boy. I would guess it’s after the unsuccessful ’96 campaign, he came back the next year in ’97 to thank the home folks for all they’d done for him in his political career, and that’s probably the last time I talked to him face-to-face. So it’s been ten years now.

Williams: And what kind of an event was that? What was that like?

This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Ferguson 4-19-07—p. 28

Ferguson: Well, he had a series of events. He went to Russell. He came to Topeka. I think he went to Wichita. They invited Republicans and others. They were public events to come so Senator Dole could publicly thank the people of Kansas for all the support they had given him over the years.

Williams: Were those melancholy events or were they exuberant?

Ferguson: No, I wouldn’t call them melancholy events. Actually, they were kind of like celebrations of his political career, even though he’d lost the presidency. There weren’t people wearing sackcloth and renting their garments because he had—because this was quite a few months after the ’96 election. I would classify them more as celebrations of his long political career and what he had done for Kansas.

Williams: What was Kansas’ reaction to his resigning from the Senate?

Ferguson: Shock. Nobody expected it. Because he had such a powerful position, everybody just assumed he would hang onto the Senate seat and finish out his term if he got defeated, so it came as a bolt out of the blue when he did it, and it took the Republicans in Kansas, except those who were in the know—in fact, some of the people who were pretty close to Dole, it took them by surprise, that I knew. Then, of course, it triggered a series of events that led to the rise of in politics, because the governor at the time, Bill Graves, appointed his lieutenant governor, Sheila Framm, to replace Bob, and then they had to have an election in the fall of ’96 to decide his successor, and Brownback ran for that, challenged Framm for it, and it was a fairly bitter campaign, and Brownback won that campaign, then won reelection, and then rose in the estimation of the cultural Republicans, conservative Republicans, until he could run for the Republican nomination for the presidency in 2007.

Williams: You’ve used the term “cultural Republican” several times today. Define that term.

This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Ferguson 4-19-07—p. 29

Ferguson: The hot-button issues of abortion, gun control, school prayer, culture is important to them. They would call them “values.” To me, I don’t like the term “Religious Right.” I don’t like the term “religious conservative.” So I call them cultural, or I have for a long—in fact, in my writing I called them cultural conservatives. It was kind of a catch name that I think people caught onto and they knew who you were talking about. It’s like we now call—the other side are called “moderate Republicans.” Thirty, forty years ago, those were the conservative Republicans. Now they’re the moderate Republicans because these religious/cultural evangelical Republicans have co-opted the conservative end of the spectrum from them. There was a former member of the Republican National Committee from Wichita, who said that he used to consider himself as conservative as there was in the Republican Party, and he said, “I don’t know when I became a moderate, but that’s what they call me now.” [laughs]

Williams: I think we might end on a question I have here. If it wasn’t me sitting here but it was Bob Dole suddenly, would you have any questions that might immediately come to mind you’d like to ask him?

Ferguson: Well, I think I would ask him if he ever wished he had exhibited a little bit softer personality in the old days, because he came across as a very harsh personality for a lot of years, some would even say mean. I never could understand—I always thought he didn’t have to be that way. He could have softened that a lot and still been just as popular, and like I said earlier, I don’t know how much of that came out of his war experience and his wound experience and his clawing his way—in his mind, he had to be that way to claw his way to the top politically. I don’t know how he would rank that, or anybody else.

Williams: Twenty years from now, how do you think people will look back on Bob Dole?

Ferguson: Oh, I think they will look back and say he was a strong Republican Leader of the United States Senate who might have been president, but had certain personality This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Ferguson 4-19-07—p. 30 flaws that caused a lot of voters to question whether he was a person they were comfortable with, and I think that as much as Bill Clinton’s popularity at the time kept Bob from being president.

Williams: Have we left anything unsaid today that occurs to you?

Ferguson: I can’t think of a thing. I greatly admire Bob Dole and what he did, and I respect what he did. I mean it very honestly. I wish he could have softened up his public image at that critical period in his career when he might have come across as a nicer guy, and it might have gotten him even farther in politics. A lot of people remember how nasty he came across in that vice presidential debate, and a lot of people, it never left their minds. I always thought he didn’t need to do that. He didn’t need to be—the popular political phrase is, a hatchet man. Gerald Ford, in my opinion, didn’t need that, and Bob Dole didn’t need to fill that role, but he or somebody told him, I guess, to do it. On his behalf, I’ve always regretted he came across like that.

Williams: Thank you.

[End of interview]

This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Ferguson 4-19-07—p. 31

Index

Archer Daniels Midland, 29 Associated Press, 9, 18, 25

Brownback, Sam, 39

Clinton, William J., 30, 32, 35, 40 1996 presidential campaign, 34 Crow, Sam, 31

Dole, Elizabeth, 36 Dole, Robert J., 9, 35, 37, 40 1974 senatorial campaign, 6, 7, 8, 11, 13, 14, 15, 19, 20, 36 1976 vice presidential campaign, 21 1976 vice presidential debate, 41 1980 senatorial campaign, 19, 22 1986 senatorial campaign, 19, 23, 24 1988 presidential campaign, 34 1992 senatorial campaign, 24 1996 presidential campaign, 34 abortion issue in 1974 campaign, 13 and Archer Daniels Midland, 29 and Dave Owen, 32, 33 and Lewis L. Ferguson, 18, 35 and Nancy Kassebaum, 30, 31 and Watergate, 6, 9 and William J. Clinton, 30 as chairman of the National Republican Party, 6 as U.S. Senate Majority Leader, 23 election night, 1974, 18 interest in veterans issues, 20 maintaining contact with Kansas constituents, 10, 22, 25, 27, 38 newspaper coverage during 1974 senatorial campaign, 12 offers Lewis L. Ferguson a job, 7, 9 resignation from U.S. Senate, 38 Dreiling, Norbert, 6

Eisenhower, Dwight D., 23

Ferguson, Lewis L. career with Associated Press, 2 educational background, 2, 3 first exposure to Dole, 6 first impressions of Robert J. Dole, 6 This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Ferguson 4-19-07—p. 32

in charge of Associated Press State House Bureau in Topeka, Kansas, 2 journalism background, 2, 3 member of Kansas Board of Regents, 2 on 1974 senatorial campaign, 11, 12, 13, 14, 17, 19, 20 on 1980 senatorial campaign, 19 on 1986 senatorial campaign, 19 on abortion issue in Kansas in 1974, 13 on Alfred M. Landon, 8 on Dave Owen, 32, 33 on Dr. Bill Roy, 14, 16, 23, 36 on Elizabeth Dole, 36 on family farming in Kansas, 28, 29 on Gerald R. Ford, 41 on Gloria O'Dell, 24 on growth of technology, 18, 21 on Guy McDonald, 23 on Kansas attitude about selling wheat to the Soviet Union, 28 on Nancy Kassebaum, 30, 31 on newspaper reporting, 4, 5 on Robert J. Dole, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 15, 18, 19, 27, 30, 35, 36, 37, 40, 41 on Robert J. Dole and Archer Daniels Midland, 29 on Robert J. Dole as U.S. Senate Majority Leader, 23 on Robert J. Dole's 1974 senatorial campaign, 36 on Robert J. Dole's 1976 vice presidential campaign, 21 on Robert J. Dole's 1986 senatorial campaign, 24 on Robert J. Dole's 1988 presidential campaign, 34 on Robert J. Dole's 1992 senatorial campaign, 24 on Robert J. Dole's 1996 presidential campaign, 34 on Robert J. Dole's resignation from U.S. Senate, 38 on television news reporting, 5 on use of computerization 1974 election night, 18 on William J. Clinton, 35, 40 retirement, 2 Ford, Gerald R., 27, 41 Framm, Sheila, 39

Graves, William P., 2, 39

Hutchinson News, 12

Junction City Daily Union, 12

Kansas City Star, 17 Kassebaum, Nancy, 31 and Robert J. Dole, 30

Landon, Alfred M., 7, 8, 23, 31

This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Ferguson 4-19-07—p. 33

Massey, Barry, 25 McDonald, Guy, 23 Minor, Bob, 9 Montgomery, John D., 12

National Public Radio, 5 Nixon, Richard M. effect of presidency on Republican Party, 7

O'Dell, Gloria 1992 senatorial campaign against Robert J. Dole, 24 Owen, Dave, 32, 33

Parson’s Sun, 12

Reed, Clyde M., 12 Roy, Dr. Bill, 11, 23, 36 1970 senatorial campaign, 16 1974 senatorial campaign, 14, 15, 16, 20 abortion issue in 1974 campaign, 13, 14 as member of House of Representatives, 16 opposition to Vietnam War, 15

Simpson, John 1980 senatorial campaign against Robert J. Dole, 22

Technology during 1974 campaign, 18 during 1976 campaign, 21 in twenty-first century, 21

VanBebber, Tom, 31, 33

Watergate, 6 Wichita Eagle, 17