E. Dole.
The real power players at the Red Cross were not the board or the senior vice presidents but rather a small group that appears nowhere on the charity’s organization chart, known as Elizabeth Dole’s “special team.” Although this group had no formal authority, she took no major decision without its approval and often sought its advice prior to consulting the members of her senior staff with operating responsibility in politically sensitive areas.
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The group, which sometimes convened in toto, sometimes in part, included two official staff members and three outsiders hired as consultants–all of them fiercely political supporters of Mrs. Dole. The insiders were Jennifer Dorn, the Red Cross senior vice president for policy and planning, who had been Dole’s top aide at the Departments of Transportation and Labor before a brief stint as the director of strategic planning for Martin Marietta (it became Lockheed Martin in 1995) under chairman Augustine, and John Heubusch, the Red Cross vice president of communications, who recently left the organization to become executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. The consultants included Mari Maseng Will, the wife of conservative columnist George Will, who has spent nearly her entire professional career working as a press officer and speechwriter for Republican Presidents (Reagan and Bush) or nominees. She has held a high-level position in all of the Dole-for-President campaigns, including the current one (until she recently resigned for personal reasons), and she also directed communications in Elizabeth Dole’s Transportation Department. Two other members of the special team added as consultants were Michael Goldfarb, a private business consultant and the former chief of staff at the Federal Aviation Administration, and, less actively, Bob Davis, Mrs. Dole’s private attorney and counsel for the Dole presidential campaign. Dorn, Will and Davis were all cited in the acknowledgments of the Doles’ autobiography, The Doles: Unlimited Partners, written for the 1988 presidential campaign.