Charming her way to the White House; air travel stinks, auto safety is a joke - and Washington still loves Liddy Dole.

• Author: Weiss, Philip
• Position: Elizabeth Dole

CHARMING HER WAY to the WHITE HOUSE

"She's progressive at the core'--a former aide to Elizabeth Dole, quoted in Fortune.

"She is essentially a conservative person'-- Virginia Knauer, Dole's former boss in the Nixon White House.

This summer, when every day seemed to bring another report of a close call in the skies, the media began taking a keen interest in air safety. Typical was the Newsweek cover story,' "The Year of the Near Miss,' which declared, "America's air-travel system is showing signs of breakdown. Reports of midair near collisions are soaring, errors by controllers are on the rise and the flying public's tolerance for cattle-car conditions and horrendous delays is wearing thin.' You'd think that such an article would include a rather pointed crtitique of whoever's responsible for the mess. But the article, like other pieces about airline chaos, lacked any criticism of the Secretary of Transportation, Elizabeth Hanford Dole. The piece did not picture Dole, mentioned her only three times, and then in a positive light--even though her policies are largely to blame for the crisis.

The widespread image of Elizabeth Dole is of a politically moderate, competent, woman cabinet secretary, a view she has tried to reinforce by promoting herself as the "safety secretary.' Her positive image has survived the doubling of airplane near-misses, an 18 percent increase in air traffic controller errors, and 19 major airline mergers. Though she has ignored auto safety problems that have killed thousands of people and weakened auto recall efforts, her policies have had no ill effect on the staggering number of invitations she gets to speak across the country or the lavishness of praise bestowed by feature columnists.

Dole is no antiregulation ideologue. But she is a species just as common in Washington--the consummate role player, her positions defined by her job description rather than deeply felt beliefs. Indeed she has been the Wallenda of Washington's big top, performing astounding flips throughout 21 years in top government posts, starting with the Johnson administration. She has gone from Democrat to Independent to Republican and espoused such divergent positions as (circa 1975) urging the breakup of a major oil company to (circa 1986) approving mergers in which an airline got 80 percent of a market. Or (circa 1973) calling for Congress to create a consumer advocacy agency dealing with those who "oppress' consumers to (circa 1987) opposing Congress's bipartisan effort to tell consumers how well airlines were meeting their schedules.

Yet today, Dole's political stock seems more secure than ever. Profiles now mention her role as not just a potential First Lady if Senator Robert Dole's campaign succeeds but as a presidential or vice presidential candidate in her own right. "She has the dynamism and magnetism that make people want to come up and meet her,' marvels Charles Black, the campaign manager for Rep. Jack Kemp, one of her husband's opponents. "It could be next year, or ten years from now, but I'll be very surprised if she is not on the ticket one of these days.' If she gets that far it will be interesting to see if The New York Times still gives her this sort of appraisal: "One of the most stunning women in Washington--slender, blue-eyed, and fair-skinned, with dark hair worn in a flippy style that she says is "my first blow-dry hairdo; I'm worried that it might be too flat on top.''

May Queen Liddy

Mary Elizabeth Hanford was born 51 years ago in Salisbury, North Carolina, a small city halfway between Charlotte and Winston-Salem, where she grew up extremely well-off. Her mother, Mary Hanford, talks of a pet chihuahua; there were also horseback riding lessons, water skiing, ballet, tennis, piano, a weekend house, a debutante ball, and the guiding thought that she could get anything she wanted. She was the second child by many years of a rich florist who was locally regarded as conservative and dour. Her mother belonged to the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America, a largely southern group whose members trace their lineage to a noteworthy individual in colonial service, thus gaining status over the Daughters of the American Revolution. In time, the daughter, too, would become a Colonial Dame.

Friends say that even at a young age Elizabeth (or "Liddy,' as she named herself when beginning to talk) was drawn to public activities. "She always loved to participate,' her mother says, noting that she rushed off Saturdays to help a neighborhood woman organize activities for the Children of the American Revolution. As a child, as she would so often as an adult, Liddy Hanford campaigned. She was a toddler when she won a competition to be the mascot of the graduating high school class of her brother, who was 13 years her senior, and in third grade she was president of a class club. At the Woman's College at Duke, Hanford was elected president of the student body and majored in political science.

Hanford had been brought up with the values of a traditional southern woman--her mother urging her to study home economics and then come back to Salisbury--and in many ways she hewed to her genteel raising. She joined a Duke sorority and was selected in her senior year to a secret society of seven members called White Duchy. College friends remember her as being popular in part for her beauty, and when she was elected the May Queen she reigned over the spring dance with her court. Later she worked part time as a model.

Such traditional choices for a good-looking, socially well-placed woman were alloyed even then with a desire to enter the traditionally male world of politics. Childhood friend Wyndham Robertson says that while it was easy to picture Elizabeth being comfortable as the housewife of a Charlotte businessman with club memberships and all the rest, she was too driven for that. She went to the Harvard Graduate School of Education and later entered the law school there, by which time she'd crossed a certain divide. "We were both considered to be old maids from the time we were 25,' Robertson says. "We used to laugh about it and had a pact not to get married.' Another friend explains that Dole didn't stop to have a family in part because she was so driven. "She had a lot of discipline about her. Most people in our age category had more zigs and zags.'

One thing Elizabeth Hanford acquired forthrightly were political connections. "She walked through the door, she didn't have an appointment and we hired her that afternoon,' says Bill Cochrane, the former administrative assistant to B. Everett Jordan, the late Democratic senator from North Carolina. "Phi Beta Kappa at Duke and the Queen of May--she was extremely qualified.'

A "good Democrat' and "a liberal' in the descriptions of various associates, she served for several months as a legislative secretary to Jordan, a moderate Democrat. Because she was "personable and attractive,' Cochrane recommended her to LBJ's staff when the senator needed southerners to help organize a whistle-stop campaign tour for his vice presidential campaign in October 1960. She ended up on the train for five days as a greeter, taking the names and addresses of townspeople who clambered on one town up the line from their own so they could accompany LBJ those 30 miles and then mill around him on the platform as he gave a speech to their neighbors.

In subsequent summers she worked at other liberal station stops, the United Nations and Peace Corps, and after law school flew back to Washington, which, she said, attracted her "like a magnet.' At the time Washington was possessed by Johnson's vision of a Great Society, and so was Elizabeth Hanford. One friend remembers her as a "Harvard liberal.' She worked at the Department of Education, organizing a conference on the education of the deaf, and upon leaving the job in 1967 went into private practice providing legal representation to indigents. In one case she took on a recent immigrant, a former zoo keeper, who was accused of petting a lion in the National Zoo without consent; Hanford won the case by pointing out that since the prosecution had not called the lion to testify it was impossible to say the defendant had stroked it without consent.

"She walked in right off the darn street and had a resume that looked like a million dollars, and she had these names on there,' recalls her next boss, Leslie Dix, who hired Hanford in 1968 for President Johnson's Committee on Consumer Interests. Among the names were former North Carolina Gov. Terry Sanford and the late Democratic Senator Sam Ervin, Jr. "A great girl, wonderful,' Dix recalls of her references. "Everything was a four-star rating.'

Johnson had established the committee in 1964 as the consumer's voice within the administration --"we were gung-ho,' says Betty Furness, who as the director put through such pioneering legislation as the truth in lending and wholesome meat laws. Hanford worked on legislation. Furness says, "She seemed to be right with us,' a fierce consumer advocate.

Thus Furness and Dix were a bit surprised that when Richard Nixon came into the White House ten months later, and they left, their right-thinking associate Hanford remained on the job, though the office's view of consumer advocacy changed sharply. Under Virginia Knauer, the office had more of a good housekeeping aura, intent on distributing product information to people and ironing out problems with manufacturers. Consumers, Hanford told Congress, complained more than anything about automobiles--lemons, safety problems, and so on--but office procedure was to call the manufacturer and work things out individually. "Industry has been pleased with this method,' she told Congress.

"Whether Elizabeth changed her mind or changed her colors, I don't know,' Furness says. One thing Hanford did change was her registration, from Democrat to Independent.

Knauer was smitten by Hanford ("she's a tremendously...