Longtime Republican fixture and 1996 Presidential nominee Bob Dole has died at age 98:
It is with heavy hearts we announce that Senator Robert Joseph Dole died early this morning in his sleep. At his death, at age 98, he had served the United States of America faithfully for 79 years. More information coming soon. #RememberingBobDole pic.twitter.com/57NtGfqtmL
— Elizabeth Dole Foundation (@DoleFoundation) December 5, 2021
Dole was around so long that it many ways he came to represent both the strengths and weaknesses of the Republican Party establishment.
He served honorably in the grueling Italian campaign of World War II where he was seriously wounded.
In 1942, Dole joined the United States Army’s Enlisted Reserve Corps to fight in World War II, becoming a second lieutenant in the Army’s 10th Mountain Division. In April 1945, while engaged in combat near Castel d’Aiano in the Apennine mountains southwest of Bologna, Italy, Dole was seriously wounded by a German shell, being struck in his upper back and right arm, shattering his collarbone and part of his spine. “I lay face down in the dirt,” Dole said. “I could not see or move my arms. I thought they were missing.” As Lee Sandlin describes, when fellow soldiers saw the extent of his injuries, all they thought they could do was to “give him the largest dose of morphine they dared and write an ‘M’ for ‘morphine’ on his forehead in his own blood, so that nobody else who found him would give him a second, fatal dose.”
Dole was paralyzed from the neck down and transported to a military hospital near Kansas, expected to die. Suffering blood clots, a life-threatening infection and a fever of almost 109 degrees…
Holy crap! I didn’t know you could even survive a fever of 109°! 22-year-old Bob Dole must have been tough as nails.
…after large doses of penicillin were not successful, he overcame the infection with the administration of streptomycin, which at the time was still an experimental drug. He remained despondent, “not ready to accept the fact that my life would be changed forever”. He was encouraged to see Hampar Kelikian, an orthopedist in Chicago who had been working with veterans returning from war. Although during their first meeting Kelikian told Dole that he would never be able to recover fully, the encounter changed Dole’s outlook on life, who years later wrote of Kelikian, a survivor of the Armenian genocide, “Kelikian inspired me to focus on what I had left and what I could do with it, rather than complaining what had been lost.” Dr. K, as Dole later came to affectionately call him, operated on him seven times, free of charge, and had, in Dole’s words, “an impact on my life second only to my family”.
Dole recovered from his wounds at the Percy Jones Army Hospital. This complex of federal buildings, no longer a hospital, is now named Hart-Dole-Inouye Federal Center in honor of three patients who became United States Senators: Dole, Philip Hart and Daniel Inouye. Dole was decorated three times, receiving two Purple Hearts for his injuries, and the Bronze Star with “V” Device for valor for his attempt to assist a downed radioman. The injuries left him with limited mobility in his right arm and numbness in his left arm. He minimizes the effect in public by keeping a pen in his right hand, and learned to write with his left hand. In 1947, he was medically discharged from the Army as a captain.
Dole started his political career as a solid conservative with a great dry wit who gradually got squishier over the years. He was a fixture as Kansas Senator from 1969-1996. He was Gerald R. Ford’s running mate in 1976, and served as Republican Majority leader from 1985-87.
He launched multiple unsuccessful Presidential campaigns, finishing way back of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush and a host of others in 1980, then losing to Bush again in 1988.
He finally won the nomination in 1996, with Jack Kemp as his running mate, when the American electorate opted to reelect draft-dodging Bill Clinton over wounded World War II hero Dole (thanks again, in no small measure, to H. Ross Perot’s third-party run). It goes without saying that he would have made a much better President than Clinton, though I wonder if the Welfare Reform Act of 1996 becomes law without a Democratic President pushing for it.
Dole was a good Republican who simply stayed in Washington too long, where he and second wife Elizabeth Dole became one of the earliest “power couples” that have become the normal way of doing business there. Dole was widely liked and seemed to be a good sport, as this clip with Saturday Night Live‘s Norm Macdonald (who we also lost this year) shows:
This clip of Bob Dole and Norm Macdonald a week after Dole lost in 1996 is so great and it's beyond sad to lose both of them this year.pic.twitter.com/gUa2B9Dnfg
— Josh Jordan (@NumbersMuncher) December 5, 2021
He was awarded a Congressional Gold Medal in 2017, one of only eight senators to receive it.
Whatever you think of both Dole and Bush, the moment when the wheelchair-bound Dole is lifted to standing to properly salute the casket of his fellow veteran and former rival is deeply moving:
Dole was important figure for a long time in American politics, and another stark reminder that World War II is passing out of living memory.
