This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu ROBERT J. DOLE ORAL HISTORY PROJECT Interview with BOB DOVE March 27, 2008 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 Dove 3-27-08—p. 2 [Note: First 5:20 of interview recorded on audio file but not on videotape. See page 3 for start of video recording.] Williams: This is an oral history interview with Bob Dove for the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas. We are in Bob’s home in the city of Falls Church, Virginia, and today is Thursday, March 27, 2008. I’m Brien Williams. Bob, I want to ask you to start by just giving me a little bit of your own personal background and the steps that led you to the Senate. Dove: It was an incredibly lucky choice on my part. I attended Duke University and worked under a major professor there, who the Parliamentarian of the Senate in 1966 had worked under in the 1930s, and he was looking for someone to bring into the parliamentarian’s office at the bottom position, called second assistant parliamentarian. He wrote to this professor. At that point I was actually teaching at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, and I got this letter from my professor, would I be interested in going to Washington, D.C., and working for the U.S. Senate as second assistant parliamentarian, a job I knew nothing about. I had been trained in constitutional law and public administration. I had no particular training in Senate procedure or parliamentary procedure, but I certainly didn’t hesitate to tell my professor, “Yes, I would love to do that.” I was interviewed by the Parliamentarian; his name was Floyd Riddick. And based on that interview, I was selected. So I arrived in Washington in July of 1966, went into the Parliamentarian’s office, frankly, assumed that having done so, I would never leave the Parliamentarian’s office. That was the tradition in the mid-sixties; you entered the office and you stayed. That didn’t happen to me, and partly thanks to Senator Bob Dole, I actually ended up being Parliamentarian of the Senate twice, once when Senator [Howard] Baker was Leader, and then for the first two years of Senator Dole’s Majority Leadership, and then again when Senator Dole became Majority Leader again, and at his behest, I returned to the office and I stayed there until the spring of 2001. So I spent thirty-five years working for the Senate, either in the Parliamentarian’s office or for Senator Bob Dole. This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Dove 3-27-08—p. 3 Williams: Did you regret, after all your training, leaving the academic profession a bit? Was that a difficult decision to make? Dove: No, for this reason. I loved the teaching, and in fact, since I left the Senate in 2001, I’ve returned to teaching and now teach at three universities here. I did not like the faculty meetings. I did not like the other parts of academia that are necessarily a part of it. I loved the teaching, and I’m glad I got back to that. Williams: Stepping back before Duke, where did you grow up and when did you graduate? Dove: I’m a native of Ohio. I grew up outside of Columbus. I did my undergraduate work at Ohio State University and did not leave Ohio until I went off to graduate school at Duke University. Williams: Prior to coming to the Senate, were you much aware of Bob Dole? Dove: Not at all. I was only in academia three years before I came to the Senate, two years at The Citadel, a military college in South Carolina, and one year at Iowa State. I knew that Senator Dole was a member of Congress then, but I had not focused on his career at all. In fact, I didn’t really focus on his career until he was elected to the Senate, at which point, of course, I was working on the floor of the Senate and began to see him on a regular basis. Williams: In your family background, were you highly partisan? Hold on. Something happened here. [Pause. Video recording begins here.] Okay. I was asking you about partisanship in your family. Dove: I was in a Republican family. My parents supported Senator Robert Taft, who was, in their mind, kind of a demigod, very popular in Ohio. I adopted their politics and actually worked under a gentleman by the name of Ray Bliss, who was the chairman of This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Dove 3-27-08—p. 4 the state Republican Party when I was in college at Ohio State. I was a chairman of an Iowa caucus in 1965, but this is long before the Iowa causes meant anything or anyone had ever heard of them. It’s always been a pleasure of mine to remember that there was a time before Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter changed the whole Iowa caucus experience. But Iowa was holding caucuses long before then, and they were very low key and on the campus at Iowa State I held a caucus, and we were lucky to have eight people at that caucus. Of course, that has all changed. But that was my experience with partisanship. I will say that in the Parliamentarian’s office I tried to be studiously non-partisan, which I thought was expected, and I think that was appropriate, but up to that point I had considered myself a Republican. Williams: I think rather than follow my original scheme here, before we can talk about your working for Dole, it’s probably important to talk a little bit about that period prior to your working with Dole, when you were appointed the Parliamentarian by Howard Baker. But let’s back up even further from that. When you first started working in the Parliamentarian’s office, explain your role. Williams: The Parliamentarian’s office is an unusual place, in that no real outside training is much help. What the Parliamentarian in the Senate does is impart to senators and staff their knowledge of what the Senate rules are and, much more important than that, the precedents that have been set since the rules were codified in 1884. There would be no reason, I think, for anyone to study that without really good reason, and, of course, the best reason is you’re in the office. So it was totally on-the-job training. Having gone into the office, the expectation was that you would spend several years training, before you were of any value at all to the office, both watching the Senate in action and, more to the point, reading some of the 11,000 precedents of the Senate that interpreted the Senate rules, the only copies of which are in the Office of the Senate Parliamentarian. So for three years that is what I did, watched the Senate, read those precedents, and tried to get up to speed so that I could do what the two people above me, Floyd Riddick, who was the Parliamentarian, and a gentleman by the name of Murray Zweben, who was the assistant were doing, because they had also done this. It’s an office which operates much like a monarchy. If you live long enough, you get to be Parliamentarian. It’s a straight-line This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Dove 3-27-08—p. 5 ascension. It’s not a pyramid where people are competing against each other. You just wait your turn, and if you have studied and if you have produced, then you get to be Parliamentarian. Williams: I’m curious. Where was your position to watch the Senate? Where did you observe? Dove: On the Senate floor. This is long before the Senate was on television, so until 1986, if you were going to watch the Senate, you had to sit on the floor, and for those first three years I would be sitting on the back benches, where staff sat. After three years, I began to sit in the Parliamentarian’s chair, which is a very good vantage point to watch the Senate from. Williams: When you were doing that, you were actually operating as Parliamentarian? Dove: Yes, which was to advise the chair on everything they say, and then to advise senators and staff, who would come up to the desk and ask questions. Williams: You mentioned these 11,000 pages, I guess it was, or 11,000 precedents. Dove: Precedents. There are more pages than precedents. Many precedents are multi- page writings. Williams: Are these a matter of public record or is it a closed book in the Parliamentarian’s office? Dove: There was an attempt, when Senator Baker was Leader, to make them a matter of public record. For whatever reason, that ended up failing, and as of now, to my knowledge, there is no public record of the precedents. Now, there is a book, it is called Senate Procedure, which is a small, like one- or two-sentence summary of each of these precedents, but the full precedents are not published or available.