Dec 6, 2021
The Veteran: Bob Dole of Russell, Kansas
ROBERT DOLE was born in 1923, and so his formative years in Russell, Kansas were some of the worst years ever for America — the early years of the Great Depression when dust storms swept through Russell, some people died of “dust pneumonia” and babies were wrapped in wet sheets to try to protect them.
Bob’s mother, Bina, was a seamstress and sold sewing machines on commission. Bob’s father, Doran Dole, owned a creamery and butter station. In the 1930’s, many of his farming customers couldn’t pay cash, and offered chickens and other kinds of barter. Later, Doran ran a grain elevator, and was a volunteer fireman. Doran was an amusing guy but it was dry humor. He’d make a funny crack, looking as if he didn’t know it was funny.
Bob went to The Dream Theater in town, and saw all of Ronald Reagan’s movies there. Bob worked as a soda jerk at Ol’ Dawson’s Drugstore. But what set him apart from other kids was how strong and athletic he was, and how determined. He was going to play basketball at the University of Kansas for the great Phog Allen, and then go to medical school to be a surgeon. At a very young age, he had this plan and an incredible will.
He was always running from one place to another, from one chore or job to another. Bob was always on the go, taller and handsomer than other boys, but harder-working too. He had the first set of weights in Russell, chunks of concrete on each side of a pole, which he was raising and lifting all the time, building up his body. He got to be 6'2" and 194 pounds, very strong in his upper body.
He was recruited by Phog Allen, playing football and basketball at Kansas and the plan was going well. He got into one of the elite fraternities on campus, and was dating one of the prettiest girls on campus. Then on December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and suddenly the United States was at war.
Bob hung on at school for a while, but when the Russell draft board came after his younger brother, Bob knew it was time to go off and fight. He volunteered, was sent into combat in Italy and made a platoon leader in the Tenth Mountain Division.
On April 14, 1945, in the brutal last months of the war in Europe, Bob and his platoon were crossing rocky ground in a valley outside the town of Castel D’Aiano. A German machine gun nest in a farmhouse was picking off Dole’s platoon like target practice. He knew he would have to somehow take out the machine gun nest.
He and his men scrambled toward it, taking cover in any kind of hole in the ground they could find. Dole was in a hole and saw one of his buddies get hit by machine gun fire. Dole scrambled out of the hole, grabbed his buddy, but before he could get back into the hole, Dole was hit himself, with shrapnel from an artillery shell. His buddy was dead, and Dole was in shock, his whole right side opened up.
He was so badly injured, with that awful gray look in the face, that the others assumed he would die. One man stayed with him and called for medics. The Germans killed the first two medics trying to get to Dole, and he had to lie in a foxhole for nine hours before he could be evacuated. By the time the Army finally got Dole to a hospital, doctors found grave damage not only to Dole’s shoulder and arm but to the vertebrae in his neck and spine. He also lost a kidney from the shrapnel blast. The doctors expected Dole to die, but when he stubbornly stayed alive, they sent him home in a full body cast.
Back in Russell, the Dole family had been notified by an Army wire that Bob had been wounded, but when Bina Dole saw her son in that full body cast, she was devastated. This very physical, restless son of hers, so proud of his body, now couldn’t move or feed himself, or use the toilet without help. Mrs. Dole found several cigarette butts in the cast. Some servicemen had used her son as an ashtray.
The man who’d run everywhere now had to spend 39 months teaching himself how to walk again, forcing himself to improve. There were seven operations in three years. Bob used a weight-and-pulley system to get stronger. The doctors and nurses who worked with him had almost never seen a man so obsessed with getting his old body back. But he realized he could never use his right arm again, never use a pen or pencil again. He’d lost the dexterity in his fingers.
People in Russell chipped in to help him get back on his feet. Ol’ Dawson’s Drugstore put out a cigar box and customers dropped in donations. Recalling that kindness in a hometown speech during the 1976 Presidential campaign, Dole had a rare loss of emotional control. But the rehab days were tough. One guy from around Russell looked over at Dole and said ‘Bet you wish they’d finished you off, huh?’
At an Army Hospital in Battle Creek, Michigan, Dole fell in love with his occupational therapist Phyllis and they got married, and had a daughter named Robin.
Bob decided it was going to be politics, not medicine. Some Republicans had sounded him out about running as a state rep. Hardworking war hero recovering from his wounds… It was a great political profile. Though his parents were FDR Democrats, Dole became a Republican. In later years, Dole joked that his rock-solid allegiance to the Republican Party was forged when he ran for public office and realized there were a lot more Republicans in Kansas than Democrats.
But it was more than that. He loved the Republican ideal of self-sufficiency. He had a horror of debt, of living beyond one’s means, and he found the Democrats too free-spending for his taste. He liked to think you make it on your own, with help from family and friends. You don’t take any more than you have to from the Federal government. Bob would sometimes boast, before certain audiences, about having voted against Medicare. He wanted wherever possible, to give power to state governments, not the federal government.
Before he could run for office, he had to get through law school — without being able to write. He kept an amazing amount in his head.
In 1950, he won a seat in the Kansas House of Representatives. He first made his name statewide by arguing against a severance tax on oil and gas before the Kansas Supreme Court. Oil interests remembered that and backed Dole when he ran for Congress in 1960, and again when he ran for the Senate in 1968. The billionaire Charles Koch, who gave the founding grant to the libertarian Cato Institute, was a big backer of Bob Dole’s political career. Another mentor to Dole was Huck Boyd, a newspaper publisher from Phillipsburg, Kansas.
Early in his career, as a little-known Congressman, Dole traveled all over, trying to raise his profile. Once at a little radio station in Indiana, the interviewer welcomed “Bob Doyle” and noted that Mr. Doyle had entered politics after suffering a serious head injury. Dole found these little moments useful; he treasured their humor, but also used them as fuel, determined someday to be on a bigger stage, to be better known.
Everything was hard for Dole. Just getting dressed in a suit was hard because of his war injuries. He couldn’t tie his own shoes. Shaking hands with the voters — the threshold act in politics! — was impossible. Political dinners where rubbery chicken was served was another staple of politics, but Dole hated for people to see that he couldn’t use a fork and knife. On the other hand, he had a deep voice, a remarkable memory, an effortless wit, and he could get by with only a few hours of sleep a night.
He learned to keep a pen in his mangled hand to make sure people didn’t try to shake hands with him, but at each meeting or rally there was always someone who would hold out their hand to shake, and it always reminded Dole of what he couldn’t do. His excellent sense of humor tended to fail him at times like those. He was so totally committed to what he was doing, and so angry about what had happened to him in battle, that he couldn’t make light of his physical problems. He tried to ignore them, or outwork them.
He had a laser focus on politics and was, at times, oblivious to popular culture. Around 1967, he contacted the British Embassy to say that his daughter Robin had become enamored of a British musical group called the Beatles. Dole wondered if the British Embassy could arrange for the Beatles to play a concert at Robin’s high school. The British Embassy replied that no, they could not arrange that.
When U.S. Senator from Kansas Frank Carlson announced he wouldn’t run again in 1968, the very same day, Bob Dole announced he was running for that Senate seat. It was an uphill fight. Dole was from western Kansas, and was little-known in the East. Dole had the western Kansas attitude toward the wealth and sophistication of eastern Kansas — a mixture of admiration, envy and disgust.
He was underfunded, trying to get to Johnson County and other wealthy Republican areas in eastern Kansas, but also determined to make folks in western Kansas know that he hadn’t forgotten them. He was driving long distances, always afraid a flat tire or engine trouble would cut into his meager travel budget and make him miss an event. But he won the race, and got elected Senator.
Dole had strongly mixed feelings about campaign managers, issues people, and Washington experts of all kinds. He felt impressed when he reflected on all the things they knew, the places they’d been, the things they’d done… At the same time, he’d ask them questions in his flat Kansas accent, and note carefully and critically how they responded, often not giving them eye contact, his eyes darting around the room. If they seemed out of their depth, or if they misjudged anything, Dole had a way of dismissing them. ‘Guy doesn’t know anything’ Dole would think — or sometimes even say it under his breath, but audible.
He wouldn’t fire the guy, because he hated to fire people, but he’d work around him and the staff could see the boss had lost confidence in this guy. So Dole’s Senate office was known in Washington as a place where a lot got done, where Dole was impressive personally, but outsiders and freelancers had a rough time.
Dole’s Senate desk was clean — ceremonial. He didn’t have a big briefcase either because he couldn’t carry anything heavy. He might have a few things on a note card, or an aide carrying a light folder for him with a few papers. But, just as in law school, he kept an amazing amount in his head.
Staff were expected to keep their memos short and to the point. Long memos Dole might return without comment. If a staffer dared to write a long or opinionated memo, and ask the boss ‘Did you read my memo?’ Dole might say: “Don’t have time to discuss your political philosophy.” His staff often didn’t tell him things because they didn’t dare. He had a gift for learning exactly what he needed to know and nothing more. When he asked a staff member “What’s cookin’?” they knew they’d better have something for him.
Dole could be hard on his constituents too. When he got an angry letter from someone, he might pick up the phone and call them “Warren? Bob Dole! Listen, some damn fool sent a letter in here and signed your name to it… Thought you’d want to know.”
He’s ask one of his staffers to learn all about, say, telephone deregulation, and write him a memo. The guy would work hard on it. Dole would also have someone in the Kansas office feeding him stuff, he’d talk to other Senators, get the chairman of AT & T on the line. When Dole got the staffer’s memo, he might ask the guy, “This the best you could do?” Not in a demeaning way, almost amused. But on the surface, he didn’t act grateful to his hard-working staff. Hard work was something Dole thought should be automatic. He’d keep a driver waiting three hours, then walk up to him: “Car ready?” And it better be ready, and that driver better know exactly how to get Dole where he was going.
But the staff who worked for Dole the longest, the loyalists, found out that Dole was generous and loyal in return, that he loved to do things for his people.
Dole had to sweat out his Senate re-election, in 1974. He spent Election Night in the Topeka Ramada, watching with his parents as returns came in. Dole wouldn’t leave his suite until his staff had verified the result with election officials in all 105 counties of Kansas. In the end, Dole won by fewer than 14,000 votes out of almost 800,000 cast.
In 1971, President Nixon convinced Dole to become Chair of the Republican National Committee. The phone calls were so constant in that job that Dole moved downstairs to a basement room in his home, where he wouldn’t be distracted by Phyllis and Robin. Phyllis later said that in the first 12 months after he took the Republican National Committee job, he only ate dinner with her twice. Phyllis disliked politics and the Doles got divorced. But Phyllis thought Bob did a good job as a father, considering the pressure he was under, and he and Robin seemed to understand each other.
In 1975, Dole remarried. His new wife was Elizabeth Dole from North Carolina, later a Senator herself. She loved politics just as much as Bob did.
Dole felt that Republicans were good at making clear to the voters what they were against: Communism, liberalism, boondoggle spending. But he believed the Republicans weren’t for enough things. The average voter probably thought a Republican senator wouldn’t care if a poor guy was starving somewhere.
Well, Bob Dole cared, so he started looking at the Food Stamp program. It turned out you had to prove you were poor to take part, and the paperwork could take weeks to finalize. Then you had to pay $100 to get $150 worth of food stamps. That made no sense to Dole. What if a guy and his kids were starving right now? So Dole decided to work with liberal Democrat George McGovern to make it easier for people to get Food Stamps. When hard right conservatives complained that Food Stamps was a liberal program, Dole reminded them that the more people were eating, the better it was for Kansas farmers. On the same basis, he worked with liberal Hubert Humphrey to expand the School Lunch program.
In 1976, Dole was the Vice Presidential nominee on the Republican ticket with Gerald Ford. That was exciting and made Bob Dole a national figure — but it was a brutal schedule of constant flights, crisscrossing the country, speech after speech, never enough sleep, doing what he was asked to do: sniping at Jimmy Carter, trying to drive up his negatives. People were calling him Ford’s “hatchet man” but going negative seemed to work. By Election Day, the Ford-Dole ticket had made up a 33-point lead and in some polls even edged ahead.
But they — barely — lost to Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale. If 9,244 votes in Ohio and Hawaii had changed from Carter/Mondale to Ford/Dole, then Gerald Ford and Bob Dole would have won the election. At his post-election press conference, Dole said, “I want to say that I went home last night and slept like a baby — every two hours, I woke up and cried.”
President Ford liked Bob Dole personally and appreciated his help in winning Midwest farm states. But it had to hurt Dole when Ford wondered in a published memoir if Nelson Rockefeller could have helped Ford win to New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
Dole loved to make people laugh. In 1989, while giving a party for departing staff members, he announced there were two punch bowls, one for those who might need Senate confirmation, and another for those who would not. He once looked at a photograph of Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon and said: “There they are: See No Evil, Hear No Evil — and Evil.” He collected funny lines — but there was a darkness in there, a bitterness.
Many people thought Dole would never try another national campaign again, but they underestimated his drive and ambition. In 1980, Ronald Reagan got the Republican nomination and had quite a ride, re-elected by a landslide in 1984, a great hero in Republican circles. Dole became the Senate Republican leader in 1984. He was never close to Reagan, but noted with a touch of envy how even-keeled Reagan was: never too high, never too low. Dole thought must be a nice way to be.
In 1988, Reagan’s two terms were over and Dole ran for President, as he had, briefly, in 1980. Still, he didn’t like to talk about it directly, even with top aides. He’d refer to running for President as “the other thing.” Someone would ask Dole why he was flying to some distant state, to make a speech on behalf of the governor? Dole would say in his clipped way: “Thought I’d go… might be helpful with the other thing.”
Paul Laxalt almost ran for President in 1988, a good friend of Ronald Reagan. but Laxalt had political problems in Nevada, so he didn’t run. Howard Baker passed as well. That meant Dole just had to figure out how to defeat George Bush. Dole despised political “handlers” and, acting as his own campaign manager, made some dubious decisions. At one point, he made a last minute choice to campaign in Lubbock and Midland, Texas. There was no time to advance the trip properly, the Republicans in these towns were committed to George Bush, and the trip was a disaster.
But Dole found it very hard to surrender control of his campaign, to install a first-rate campaign manager and take direction. If he was going to let anyone run Bob Dole, they were going to have to know more about Dole’s issues than Dole did, and Dole had never met anyone like that.
Losing to George Bush in the 1988 Presidential campaign was very hard for Dole to take. He was so proud of having worked his way up from nothing. Small-town Kansas boy, deep roots in the state, and no big money in the family. Never had anything handed to him. Won election after election in his home state. Only after all that did he look toward the presidency.
To Dole’s way of thinking, what had George Bush ever done for himself? Rich family. Father a U.S. Senator from Connecticut. George moved out to Texas, pretended to be a Texan. No family roots there. Couldn’t win an election in Texas. Got appointed to a lot of high-level jobs, and hadn’t done much in any of them, from what Dole had heard. Vice President to a very popular President, Ronald Reagan. Loyal sure, but again he was asking for something — the presidency! — to be handed to him because he was on the team with Reagan.
Even the stories of Bush’s heroic service in World War Two didn’t impress Bob Dole much. Bush had suffered no war injuries remotely like those Dole had suffered. Dole just couldn’t see how anyone could find the career of George Bush more impressive than that of Bob Dole, who had made his own career, with no family help, won election after election, and been a leader in the Senate.
In 1988, Dole was told by his pollster that he was going to win New Hampshire. And he felt in retrospect that he’d made a mistake by being too cautious in those last days in New Hampshire, sitting on his lead, trying to avoid mistakes, while George Bush finished strong, on the attack. Bush won New Hampshire. Then came South Carolina and Super Tuesday, and Dole’s problems snowballed, and soon Bush had the race tucked away.
Dole always said “I’m a party-builder, not a party-divider” — so he swallowed his disappointment and campaigned for George Bush in the general election. In 1992, Dole had to support President Bush for re-election, and he did that, too.
But in 1996, Dole ran again, and this time he won the nomination, and took on President Clinton. He told voters ‘I trust the people; President Clinton trusts the government.’ Dole lost out again — lost his final chance to become President of the United States. Just after the election, President Clinton awarded Dole the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and Dole was asked to say a few words. He began “I, Robert J. Dole…” as if he were being sworn in as president. The crowd laughed, and Dole muttered “Wrong speech.”
Don Nickles, a Senator from Oklahoma, noted with many U.S. Senators you never know what city or town they’re from. With Bob Dole everyone knew: Russell, Kansas. Nickles treasured the memory of being with Bob Dole when he visited Castel D’Aiano, Italy where Dole had been so badly wounded in the war. The people in that valley were still profoundly grateful to the U.S. Army, and pleased that Dole had returned to see them. An incredible meal was prepared for Dole, Nickles and the others, and Dole was visibly moved.
After retiring from the U.S. Senate, Dole raised money for the National World War Two Memorial, which opened in 2004, next to the Washington Monument. Dole often spent time there on weekends, greeting veterans.
At age 90, he was still coming to work every day at the law firm that employed him. Macular degeneration had cost him his distance vision but he still had that work ethic.
In 2018, he was in a wheelchair when he saluted the coffin of George Bush in the Capitol Rotunda, one old veteran honoring the life of another. Then we learned that Dole had lung cancer, and in December 2021, he died.
Tim Russert was once interviewing Bob Dole for “Meet the Press” and told him: ‘We’ve had you on this program 63 times. In any of those appearances, have you ever told the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?”
To which Dole chuckled and said, “Probably not.”
