DOLE QUIT AMID CHAOS, AIDES SAY : LAST WEEKS IN SENATE VIEWED AS NADIR OF PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN.

Byline: Adam Nagourney The New York Times

By the day in late April when Sen. Bob Dole called in his presidential campaign manager to disclose that he had decided to resign from the Senate after discussions with his wife, Elizabeth, the Senate majority leader was under siege.

The usually deft Dole had been caught off guard the night before when a chance remark to reporters - that he and President Clinton should negotiate the budget face-to-face - was quickly elevated by the White House into a political duel. His Republican colleagues in the Senate had helped hand Dole a defeat on his own legislation, an amendment to a health care insurance bill.

Democrats had Dole on the defensive, from the Senate floor to the campaign trail, on the new-found issue of raising the minimum wage. As nightly television news broadcasts and morning newspapers depicted Dole enmeshed in obscure legislative squabbling, his political aides gloomily calculated that it had been two weeks since they had seen him portrayed in any other setting than the Senate floor - and that was in a bathing suit walking on the beach in Florida.

``Everybody was saying the campaign doesn't have a message, you're out of money, you can't do it from the Senate, and Clinton's golden,'' recounted a senior Dole adviser, describing what he now calls the campaign's lowest point, around the days leading to Dole's April 24 conversation with his campaign manager, Scott Reed. ``The media sycophancy of Clinton was at full roar.''

In the immediate aftermath of Dole's announcement this week, the senator and his advisers suggested that the decision to resign from the Senate was a calm and deliberative one, made by Dole while he was vacationing in Florida at the beginning of April, and evidence of a presidential candidate taking command of his candidacy.

In truth, it was far more complicated than that. Based on interviews with Dole's aides and friends, the decision was made over the course of three difficult weeks during which Dole's campaign aides felt increasingly concerned. Dole's decision-making was private and highly deliberative, as is his style, but he reached his final decision with some reluctance.

Dole did begin considering whether he should stay in office while in Florida. But it was only after those successive grueling weeks that he concluded that his duties in the Senate would not help his presidential campaign, and that his White House ambitions were in fact hurting the Senate.

Until he told Reed of his decision, Dole had not mentioned it to any of his friends in the Senate or in Washington, according to associates. He had discussed it with Elizabeth Dole, who was supportive. In a community not known for keeping secrets, Dole managed to keep one.

In the three weeks between Dole's conversation with Reed and the actual announcement, the news only barely made its way around Dole's senior staff - and that was because Bob Woodward, The Washington Post investigative reporter who is writing a book on the inner workings of the Dole campaign, caught wind of what was going on and started making inquiries.

In the wake of Dole's decision to resign from the Senate, there has been a noticeable lift in what until now had often been a gallows atmosphere at the Dole headquarters. Minor spats between Dole's campaign staff and his senatorial staff over how he should spend his time, as well as what he should be doing and saying, are beginning to pass. Scheduling meetings, an aide said, which had once been exhausting, depressing affairs - if only because of the difficulty in finding time for Dole to campaign between the demands of running the Senate - are now proceeding aggressively.

But with the flush of excitement over Dole's announcement fading, the campaign faces some residual concerns, among them that one of the most fateful decisions of Dole's political career is in danger of being characterized as a reactive maneuver, made reluctantly in response to worried aides and Republican leaders.

Dole, sitting at his condominium pool, with Congress in recess and his nomination assured, first gave serious consideration to how to balance his Senate obligations and the impending campaign.

Some of Dole's aides said Friday that he actually decided then he must quit and asserted that he never intended to try to run a presidential campaign from the Senate floor. But Dole's own comments at the time, as well as his subsequent actions, did not suggest that he was considering anything nearly so dramatic.

Rather, in his daily conversations with the small group of reporters who accompanied him there, Dole hinted at a strategy in which he would set out his own agenda before the Republican convention, by making speeches and building a Republican legislative record in the Senate, intended to burnish his credentials while embarrassing Clinton. He said the only trips he planned were fund-raisers.

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Photo: Sen. Bob Dole shows a patient at the National Rehabi litation Hospital how he relaxes his disabled hand during a campaign stop Friday.

Associated Press