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In 1968 Dole moved up to the Senate, taking the seat of Republican Frank Carlson, who was retiring. Willingly, even gleefully, the freshman Senator took on the job none of his senior Republican colleagues seemed to want: attacking the likes of Edward Kennedy, Edmund Muskie and J. William Fulbright when they criticized the new Republican President, Richard Nixon.
At one point, Dole surveyed the pride of Democratic Senators who had obvious aspirations to reach the White House and suggested that the Senate set aside a "presidential hour" every day that would be reserved for four groups: "First, those Senators who think they are President. Second, those who think they should have been President. Third, those who want to be President. And fourth, those who are willing to settle for Vice President."
As Nixon's gunslinger, Dole fought for the Administration's program virtually down the line: he supported the war in Viet Nam, helped lead the successful campaign to build the Safeguard anti-ballistic missile system (it won approval by one vote), and vainly endorsed the President's nomination of Clement Haynsworth and G. Harrold Carswell for the Supreme Court.
As Dole's career took on momentum, his family life was collapsing. Although he and his wife had been drawing apart for years, he had maintained the marriage—as he is frank to admit —out of fear that a divorce would harm him politically in conservative Kansas. Phyllis Dole had loved to campaign with him back home, when he was on the way up, but she disliked big-time politics. "I had a lot of fun stuffing envelopes and working with volunteers," she says now. "That's a lot better than being handed a schedule and told to go out alone and make a speech."
Phyllis Dole wanted to try to keep the marriage together a while longer, but the Senator wanted out. On Jan. 11, 1972, she agreed to a divorce, influenced in part by Dole's arguments that the unhappy marriage might harm the couple's only child, Robin, then a 17-year-old high school student. Now married to Lon Buzick, a rancher and the Republican chairman in Lincoln County, Dole's former wife lives in Sylvan Grove, 40 miles from Russell. When Ford picked Dole, Mrs. Buzick made an attempt to hide her sarcasm. "He always goes for the top," she said, "and apparently, he makes it."
In the meantime, Dole had taken a job that could easily have brought about a quick end to his career a good deal below the top. In January 1971, President Nixon showed his appreciation for Dole's one-man stands in the Senate by naming him Republican National Committee chairman, although Dole was still only two years into his freshman term. Senator Barry Goldwater was delighted: "He's the first man we've had around here in a long time who will grab the other side by the hair and drag them down the hill." But William B. Saxbe, then a Republican Senator from Ohio and now U.S. Ambassador to India, complained that Dole's style was so offensive that he was "a hatchet man."