LETTERS: CHARACTER COMPARISON

To the editor:

Bob Dole is reluctant to raise the issue, but character is what the presidential race is all about. With that in mind, let's examine the character of each candidate:

Dole's father, Doran, was strict, stoic and strong-willed. His first business venture failed. He then ran an egg and cream station and managed a grain elevator. He and Bina Dole were married 54 years.

Bill Clinton's father, a car salesman, died before Clinton was born. He had been married four times in nine years, the last while still married to another woman. Stepfather Roger Clinton was a drunk who often sobered up in jail.

Bina Dole, a fastidious housekeeper, sold sewing machines. She would wash out her son's mouth with soap if he used a foul word.

Clinton's mother, Virginia, also wed four times. She was a nurse-anesthetist whose work at least twice invited review by state health authorities when her patients died unexpectedly. She was a regular at the local race track.

The four Dole children led a regimented life, each with daily household chores. Clinton's mother left him with her parents while she attended nursing school out of state. The grandparents pampered him. When his mother returned, she and Roger Clinton spent their evenings drinking and gambling while young Clinton stayed with the grandparents.

In high school, Dole was a top athlete lettering in football, basketball and track. He was a National Honor Society members. Girls in his class voted him their Ideal Man. At Hot Springs High, Clinton's interests were chiefly student government and band. At 16, visiting the White House as a member of Boys' Nation, he race-walked other boys to shake hands with President Kennedy. His biographers agree the White House was always his ambition.

Dole enrolled at Kansas University as a pre-med student and made the vaunted basketball team. At 19, he enlisted in the Army during World War II. He was twice wounded, the last time receiving crippling injuries that nearly took his life. Later he attended law school under the GI bill. He carried a huge audio recorder and then would painstakingly transcribe his notes with his left hand. He had been right-handed, but that arm was left nearly useless by his wounds.

Clinton attended Georgetown University, rant for class president at 19 and was known for cramming just before tests. He went to Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship but never graduated, for unexplained reasons. At Yale Law School, he lived with girlfriend Hillary Rodham, skipped classes and borrowed notes from fellow students.

As a youth, Dole worked constantly, milking cows, digging weeds, selling patented medicines and delivering grocery handbills. In high school, he was a soda jerk. He worked his way through college waiting tables and running a weekend milk route.

Clinton never worked until college, and then always in political campaigns. His senior year he drove for Sen. William Fulbright during his re-election campaign, but Fulbright had to fire him for incompetence after Clinton left the car blocking access to a key hotel and went off with the keys to argue Vietnam with a constituent and, with Fulbright burning up in the back seat in 100-degree weather, had the air-conditioning on full blast but didn't know enough to open the car vents.

During the war, Dole completed Officers Candidate School and was assigned to an elite mountain unit in the Italian Alps. His second, near-fatal wound came when he pulled a wounded GI into a foxhole. He came home in a body cast. Doctors expected him to die, but he fought back and pulled through. Townspeople raised money to help pay his medical bills. He had been a star athlete, a weightlifter with a powerful build. Now his body atrophied so badly he refused to look into a mirror. He has said he still doesn't, except to shave. He learned to eat, dress and write lefthanded. Dressing one-handed is still a struggle, and he still suffers daily pain from his old injuries.

Clinton joined anti-Vietnam war rallies and was a low-level organizer. He solicited a colonel for a draft deferment, promising to enroll in the ROTC program at the University of Arkansas Law School. When he was convinced he would not be drafted, he reneged on his promise and enrolled at Yale. In a letter to Col. Eugene Homes, he explained he had to avoid the risk of battle, yet he didn't want to have a conscientious objector on his record so he could maintain his political viability. He said, "For years, I have worked to prepare myself for a political life."

Twenty years later, he tried to deny the letter had ever existed.

Sources for this information are "Partners in Power" by Roger Morris, "First in His Class" by David Maraniss, "Boy Clinton" by R. Emmett Tyrell and "Bob Dole" by Richard Ben Cramer.

BILL ZELLMER

Cape Girardeau