Secretary Dole, Meet Mrs. Dole

Senator Robert Dole was on his trip to Nicaragua, and the Secretary of Transportation had Sunday afternoon to herself. She left their Watergate apartment and drove to the National Cathedral. After pacing the quiet grounds, she headed for the chapel where she and Dole were married 13 years ago. Sitting on an outdoor bench, she reflected on her marriage and her career. “I couldn’t help thinking back over the years, and all the experiences and joys,” she recalls, a wistful tone creeping into her honeyed Southern accent. “This is a time now when, you know, I have to really come to that . . .” She trails off for a second, unable to utter the word “decision,” then sets a firmer, more businesslike course. “It’s a situation where the public responsibility and private obligations are facing me.”

For months Elizabeth Hanford Dole has been quietly grappling with her ^ unusual dilemma. As the top-ranking woman in the Reagan Administration, and as a highly visible and very popular official caught in the controversies of a challenging job, Secretary Dole has carved a unique and lofty niche in the Administration and her party. “I love my job,” she says. “I really do.” But her husband is running for President and needs her at his side. So, with mixed emotions, she has made what she calls “probably the most difficult decision of my life” and concluded that it is time for her to resign.

However familiar such conflicts may seem to millions of working couples, they rarely used to crop up in politics. This year is different. Elizabeth Dole, Hattie Babbitt, Jeanne Simon and Elise du Pont are all lawyers. Jill Biden and Kitty Dukakis both teach. Tipper Gore is a published author. Dole, whom some see as a future presidential contender in her own right, has the most vexing dilemma of all. “I think there is a sense that her choice will send a signal,” says Republican Pollster Linda Duvall. “Until now, we’ve never seen a situation where the wife is just as professionally credible as the husband.”

Mrs. Dole’s announcement is likely to disappoint career women who view her as a role model, and that bothers her. “It’s not that you’re giving up what you’re doing,” she offers. “It’s that you’re laying down one cause to take up another.” For more than a year she had gently but stubbornly insisted that she could stay in public office and also campaign. When her husband rather tactlessly suggested last January that his wife would have to leave her job eventually, she sharply rebuked him. The Senator, who plans to announce his candidacy formally in the next two months, turned charmingly rueful. They both made a joke of it, but she was genuinely upset. “I’ve rarely seen her angry,” says her former assistant, Mari Maseng, now communications director of the Dole campaign, “but she was annoyed.”

Her husband scrupulously refrained from pressuring her, Mrs. Dole says, and his campaign staff members did their best not to sound too insistent. It was only around the time of her solitary walk that she fully realized how little time was left to decide. Once she saw the fall schedule plans and realized how strong a demand there was for her, especially in her native South, the answer became painfully clear.

The reality of politics played its part. The Washington Post tallied the number of days in August that she combined Transportation Department travel , with campaign stops in key primary states. (The Government and the campaign split the costs of the trips.) She disputes the figures: it was 18 days, not 21, and only 11 were weekdays. “I wonder too,” she retorts, “is there a difference between candidates retaining their jobs in Government and a spouse?” Dole doesn’t single out the Vice President by name, nor does she use the harsh-sounding term double standard. But she implies it with a disarming smile.

She is more direct in responding to the growing criticism about air safety and airport delays. “That’s just not fair,” she protests after calmly reciting a list of recent measures. Always poised, she is at her most confident defending her department’s record. The Harvard-trained lawyer methodically prepares her material and is deft at marshaling facts. But she can be wounded by a stray remark. When told that a Democratic political consultant had joked, “At least no one can say she quit while she was ahead,” Dole grew silent, wide-eyed and quietly hurt. “She takes her job very seriously,” notes Robert Ellsworth, a longtime friend and her husband’s campaign chairman. “It’s very important to her.”

Dole put her husband’s career ahead of her own once before, when she resigned as a member of the Federal Trade Commission to help his ill-fated 1980 presidential campaign. Until then the former Duke University student- council president and campus Queen of the May from Salisbury, N.C., had concentrated single-mindedly on her work. She started in politics as a “greeter” on Lyndon Johnson’s 1960 vice-presidential whistle-stop tour, where she became enamored of Washington. She eventually started working there, quickly racking up high-ranking posts in Administrations of both parties. Her soft, unthreatening style as much as her credentials and competence helped her climb the male-dominated echelons of Government. She was 39 when she married Dole, and the attractive, workaholic pair instantly became a “power couple.”

For all her years in the cynical corridors of Washington, Dole has never shed her civics-student earnestness. It is ingrained in her speech: her husband’s campaign will provide her with an “opportunity”; she looks forward to the “challenge.” Deep down, she is still traditional. “When Bob makes his announcement,” she says, “instinctively I want to be at his side.” Warm, feminine and indefatigably gracious, she embodies what Americans seem to expect of a potential First Lady, but not precisely what they were used to in a powerful and problem-plagued Cabinet Secretary. Combining those two roles, she found, is nearly impossible. At least these days.