Newsman: Bob Dole, the long-serving Senate leader who spent 35 years as a Republican stalwart, including as his party’s nominee for president in 1996, died on Sunday. He was 98.
The Elizabeth Dole Foundation announced the death. “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,“ said a statement from the foundation, named for his wife, herself a former U.S. senator from North Carolina.
President Joe Biden on Sunday praised his former Senate colleague as a friend and “an American statesman like few in our history.”
“Bob was a man to be admired by Americans,” Biden said in a statement. “He had an unerring sense of integrity and honor. May God bless him, and may our nation draw upon his legacy of decency, dignity, good humor, and patriotism for all time.“
The White House later said that the president and first lady Jill Biden had spoken by phone with Elizabeth Dole to “express their sincere condolences.”
Dole’s 1996 run for president brought him the most national attention, but his four-plus decades in politics left an imprint on U.S. policies. In fact, by the early 1990s, Dole himself thought he had given all he could to his country. But a 1994 trip to the Normandy beaches on the 50th anniversary of D-Day convinced him to go all in one last time. A 20 years before the presidential nomination, he had been the party’s vice presidential nominee in 1976. He lost both times, the only American politician to do so
A man of few words but many accomplishments, Dole led a life that stretched from its beginnings in rural Kansas to the Italian battlefields during World War II to Congress.
Although a staunch conservative who focused on balanced spending, deficit reduction, and foreign policy, Dole was never beholden to the party line during his years in Congress representing his home state. He co-authored food stamp legislation with a progressive icon, persuaded President Ronald Reagan to push through tax increases and commiserated with President Bill Clinton over dealing with Newt Gingrich, the obdurate House speaker, in the 1990s — “No, you talk to him,” Dole would say to Clinton.
Former President Bill Clinton, in a statement on Sunday, said, “I enjoyed our combat, and our cooperation even more.“ He and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton added: “After all he gave in World War II, he didn’t have to give more. But he did. The power of that example should inspire people in public service today and for generations to come.“
In 1942, at the age of 19, Dole left Kansas University during his sophomore year to enlist in the Army, where he rose to the rank of second lieutenant in the Army’s 10th Mountain Division.
On April 14, 1945, with the war winding down, Dole’s division engaged the German army near Castel d’Aiano, Italy. The Americans pushed the Germans off the high ground, suffering more than 500 casualties in the process.
Seeing a downed radioman, Dole struck out to assist the fallen soldier. But German gunfire tore through his back, spinal cord, and right shoulder. For hours, Dole was paralyzed, arms folded, immobile across his chest, drifting in and out of consciousness.
“I guess some German thought I was a good target,” Dole later dryly dictated in a letter to his mother from the hospital.
It was hours before a medic could get to him. And it was three years before he was able to fully leave the hospital, suffering two near-fatal fever spikes, multiple surgeries, a lost kidney and a lost shoulder. He finally departed with a nonfunctioning right arm, only a few working fingers on his left hand and weight loss of more than 70 pounds.
Yet Dole got through law school memorizing lectures from tape recordings he made, unable to take notes. Returning to Kansas, he started him on his four-decade journey in politics. Even into his 80s, Dole continued to show up to the D.C. law firm Alston & Bird in his crisp Brooks Brothers suit, hair combed with a barber comb he carried in his back pocket for decades.
Dole was born at the center of the Dust Bowl in Russell, Kan., the kind of place where in the 1930s people had to constantly scoop dust out of theirhome.
His parents raised their family in a one-story brick house.
’’Four of us kids and my parents lived in the basement apartment for years so we could get the rent money from renting out the ground floor,’’ Dole recalled in 1985. ‘’My father ran a creamery and a grain elevator. My mother sold sewing machines and gave sewing lessons.”
Dole’s parents had modest upbringings — one of Dole’s grandfathers lost his land during the Great Depression, while the other was a tenant farmer.
’’We don’t come from any money in our family,’’ Dole said. ‘’I’m a little sensitized to people who work hard all their lives and don’t quite make it.’’
As a kid, Dole did work hard — and he always had a plan. Dole was the one who insisted on using the $26 he saved from odd jobs to buy the family a bike so all four children could have paper routes.
He carried that plan over to his time in the military.
“I was young and strong, and had an incredible desire to live,” Dole wrote about his recovery in his 2005 memoir, “One Soldier’s Story.”
He first ran for office just a few years after that recovery, getting elected to the Kansas House of Representatives in 1950. Two years later, he became county attorney in Russell County. The hometown job included a sobering moment that would likely inform his later work on welfare programs: Dole had to sign the papers for his grandfather’s welfare check each month.
’’A hard thing to do,” he recalled three decades later.
In 1960, Dole was elected to the House of Representatives, moving his career to Washington. In 1968, he won a seat in the Senate, soon becoming a Republican Party leader.
Dole chaired the Republican National Committee from 1971 to 1973, then later became Senate Finance Committee chair in 1981, before ascending to the party leadership position after the 1984 elections.
