KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Bob Dole, a son of the Kansas Dust Bowl who survived a crippling barrage of Nazi fire on an Italian hillside to lead his party in the U.S. Senate, but who fell short of his highest ambition, the presidency, died Sunday.
He was 98.
Proud, uncommonly driven and possessed of a dark, self-effacing wit, Dole went to Washington a rock-hard Great Plains conservative but evolved into a pragmatic master of legislative compromise. He voted against Medicare as a young House member in the 1960s but worked with Democratic Sen. George McGovern a decade later to protect food stamps. He was a driving force behind the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act, which required businesses and institutions to be more accessible to the disabled.
After politics, his elder statesman persona and comedic sense made him a celebrity. He joined former President Bill Clinton in regular face-offs on “60 Minutes,” became a spokesman for Viagra and appeared with Britney Spears in a Pepsi ad.
The Elizabeth Dole Foundation announced Dole’s death on Sunday, saying in a statement he died “early this morning in his sleep.”
Dole died after a battle with lung cancer. He announced in February that he been diagnosed with stage four cancer.
Dole entered public service in 1950 at age 27 and in 18 years rose from the Kansas House of Representatives, Russell County attorney and the U.S. House to the Senate. In 1976, he joined the GOP ticket as a vice presidential candidate, then ran twice unsuccessfully for the Republican presidential nomination.
Finally, in his 18th campaign in 1996, at age 73, Dole became his party’s presidential nominee.
“The White House or home,” he said that spring when he surprised the nation by stepping down from a job he loved, Senate majority leader.
Anyone who thought home meant Russell, Kansas, did not know Dole. Washington was home for him and his wife former transportation and labor secretary Elizabeth Dole, where they were a quintessential power couple.
After winning only 41% of the popular vote in his 1996 loss to Clinton, Dole entered the final phase of his long career by joining a powerful D.C. law and lobbying firm, Verner, Liipfert, Bernhard and Hand. He helped his wife in her unsuccessful 2000 presidential campaign in which she was viewed as the first woman to be taken seriously as a potential chief executive.
While Dole likely will be remembered as one of the Senate’s legislative masters, his record boasts no signature bill. Yet from the late 1960s through the mid-1990s, his reach extended to virtually every major issue faced by Congress, from farms to foreign affairs, taxes to the 1991 Persian Gulf War. He aided in a historic Social Security bailout in 1983.
Dwight Eisenhower was the old soldier’s hero. But in politics, Dole looked to another impoverished small town kid who dreamed big, even as he was knocked down. With reverence, he called Richard Nixon “the old man” and fiercely defended him through his 1974 resignation. Dole wept as he closed his eulogy for him at his 1994 funeral.
Dole’s sharp tongue, wily partisanship and often grim visage prompted many to write him off as an embittered politician. Cartoonists caricatured him as Darth Vader or the “Ayadollah.” Comedians lampooned his gruff style and habit of speaking of himself in the third person.
Even some in his own party criticized him as a skilled but cynical practitioner of power politics, where idealism often took a back seat to practical objectives.
He made no apologies for searching out common ground.
“I learned something over at that place (the Senate) over the years,” he said in May 1997. “I learned a lot about people. If you always dig deep enough, you can figure out almost everybody’s vote, if you really think about it.
“Why would he do that?” Dole said he would ask himself again and again. “And then the light goes on.”
He was always capable of surprising both friends and adversaries. In 1982, Dole crafted the compromise for a 25-year extension of the Voting Rights Act. A year later, he co-authored legislation designating Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday as a national holiday. He supported affirmative action guidelines before backing away from them as a presidential candidate in 1996.
He developed a reputation as a deficit fighter with a deeply skeptical attitude toward supply-side economics. Yet he promoted a 15% income tax rate cut as the centerpiece of his unsuccessful White House bid and picked supply-side champion Jack Kemp as his vice presidential running mate.
Early life
Robert Joseph Dole was born July 22, 1923, the second of Doran and Bina Dole’s four children. He grew up in a tiny white frame house with a family that melded the sentimentality of Norman Rockwell with the Midwestern stoicism of Grant Wood.
Doran Dole ran a cafe, an egg and cream station and the grain elevator in Russell, a windstrewn central Kansas town of 6,000 at its peak in the 1930s and ’40s. Bina Dole talked, walked and worked fast. To bring in extra cash she sold Singer sewing machines from the back of the family car, driving the countryside demonstrating sewing techniques to women.
She was fastidious and charted the lives of her four children (Dole and siblings Gloria, Kenneth and Norma Jean) with days full of chores, schoolwork, errands, Sunday school. Her personal philosophy: “Can’t’ never could do nothing.”
The Doles survived blackout dust storms, the Great Depression and the rise and fall of farm prices, even moving into the basement of their home so the upstairs could be rented to oil field workers.
Dole delivered papers and mowed lawns. He said his first taste of politics came serving milkshakes and phosphates as a teenage soda jerk at Dawson’s Drug Store on Russell’s red-brick Main Street, where he learned to hold his own in a local tradition of friendly, barbed banter.
Decades before the fitness boom of the 1970s and 1980s, Dole and brother Kenny poured concrete into tin cans and fashioned weightlifting sets. He was a strapping 6-foot-1, 190-pounds in high school, where ran the 440 and 880-yard dashes and became a basketball star.
Upon graduation, Dole decided to attend the University of Kansas in Lawrence, financed in part by borrowing $300 from a Russell businessman. Then World War II changed everything.
He was a sophomore when he enlisted in the Army and shipped off to Italy in late 1944. The new second lieutenant joined the famous 10th Mountain Division, famous for its skiing prowess. It began a long-running joke about the improbable placement of a prairie kid in such an outfit.
On April 14, 1945, less than a month before VE Day, his squad was trying to retake Hill 913 in central Italy. When he crawled to rescue a wounded soldier, Nazi fire ripped into his right shoulder, shredding bone and leaving him partially paralyzed in the mud. He went home in a body cast.
Dole earned two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star with two clusters for his gallantry. He also began a three-year ordeal to reclaim his health, losing 70 pounds and nearly dying twice from complications. His right arm remained paralyzed and mostly useless for the rest of his life.
He spent more than two years at Percy Jones Army Medical Center in Battle Creek, Mich. where he regained the use of his legs and left arm. An occupational therapist he met there, Phyllis Holden, became his wife in June 1948.
Dole had to relearn how to eat, dress, use the toilet and write with a left hand that was often numb. For years after, to discourage people from grabbing for his right hand, he grasped a felt-tip pen. He said he would come to appreciate those who would reach out with their left hands for a shake.
Returning to Russell after the war, friends rallied to help. Chet Dawson from the old Main Street drugstore started a collection for Dole’s hospital bills. He grabbed an empty cigar box, attached a “Dole Fund” label and placed it on the counter. The donations came in nickels, dimes and quarters. Banks pitched in.
The total reached $1,800, a big sum at the time. Dole kept the box in his office desk the rest of his life.
Through a family contact, he traveled to Chicago and met a respected surgeon, Hampar Kelikian.
The seven operations came in waves. Kelikian transplanted tendons from Dole’s leg to his right shoulder. A chunk of scapula was removed, and muscles in Dole’s neck were reconnected to his right arm. “Dr. K,” who didn’t charge for the surgeries, helped Dole understand something he’d been loathe to accept: that he would be partially disabled the rest of his days.
“When you join that group, you say, `Why me?’ But after you’ve been there awhile, you have to decide what you’re going to do with your life,” he told The Washington Post’s Laura Blumenfeld in 1996.
Dole exercised tirelessly, using ropes, weights and pulleys in his backyard, to regain what limited arm strength he had. In a scheme to straighten his right elbow and pry open his clawed fingers, a high school football teammate molded a six-pound lead pipe affixed with rubber bands that he could walk with on his arm.
Dole had wanted to become a doctor, but that dream was gone, replaced by a nightmare he couldn’t shake -- that he’d wind up an invalid selling pencils in little downtown Russell.
Without the use of his right hand, law school at Washburn University in Topeka was a challenge. He taped class lectures because he couldn’t take notes quickly with his left hand. At night, he’d listen and painstakingly jot shorthand notes, learning to commit vast amounts of material to memory, a skill that he would draw on decades later in the Senate.
Both Republican and Democratic party leaders exhorted Dole to consider a political career. His father was a Democrat, but Dole knew the GOP enjoyed a two-to-one advantage in Kansas.
After a single term in the Kansas House, he stormed around Russell County trying to beat Dean Ostrum, another veteran, for the county attorney’s seat.
Dole just outworked him,” a friend recalled years later.
One duty as county attorney he said he never forgot: signing welfare checks, including those for his grandparents. The experience made him sensitive to those in need. His personal responsibilities grew during this period as well. In 1954, his only child, daughter Robin, was born.
Late one night in 1960, after Dole’s re-election to a fourth term, Huck Boyd, a Kansas newspaper publisher and Republican party activist, saw the lights on at the county courthouse. He was impressed to find Dole poring over index cards for political contacts.
Boyd appointed himself Dole’s mentor and connected his protege to GOP power brokers. That year, Dole ran for Kansas’ sprawling 1st District congressional seat.
Backed by the “Bobolinks,” a team of women in matching skirts, sporting a slogan, “Roll with Dole,” and with gallons of Dole pineapple juice, Dole waged a vigorous fight, beating Keith Sebelius by less than 1,000 votes in the GOP primary.
“I guess I was very competitive anyway and even after the disability I was more competitive,” Dole said in 1994. “I was trying to prove myself that I could still make it, still do it.”
The Nixon years
In Congress, Dole adhered to a staunchly conservative agenda and voting record. He opposed Medicare and most of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society proposals with the exception of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, two landmark civil rights laws.
In 1964, though, his reelection was in danger. Kansas Republicans were deeply divided over the presidential candidacy of conservative Barry Goldwater, whom Dole backed.
Former vice president Richard Nixon, collecting IOUs for a 1968 White House race, flew into Kansas and appeared for Dole at a rally. He was dazzled by Nixon, and grateful after his narrow victory (less than three percentage points). It began one of the most intriguing relationships in American politics.
In 1968, Dole ran for Senate, defeating former Gov. Bill Avery to replace the retiring Frank Carlson. He took his seat as Nixon won the presidency. From the floor of the Senate, Dole soon became his fiercest defender. His savage tone earned him the moniker that would stick for the rest of his political life.
“He’s a hatchet man,” said GOP colleague, Sen. William Saxbe of Ohio in 1971. “He couldn’t sell beer on a troop ship.”
His loyalty impressed the most important Republican, though. In 1970, Nixon awarded Dole chairmanship of the Republican National Committee. He threw himself into the job.
In his book about the 1988 elections, “What It Takes,” Richard Ben Cramer described his efforts, traveling a half-million miles in two years as party chief:
“From the chairman’s pulpit, Dole meant to open the Party to groups long ignored: farmers, blue-collar ethnics ... blacks, Mexicans, Asians ... he never lost a chance to remind a crowd that his, theirs, was the Party of Lincoln, liberty, emancipation.
“He never lost a chance at a crowd. Dole was determined to show his critics — show everyone — that he could carry his Senate load (he still never missed a roll call) and show up in every corner of the country. ... Now, for the first time, a car came to fetch him, idling at the base of the Capitol steps as the Senate finished business for the afternoon. ... A jet was waiting at the airport. ... Advance men were waiting at another airport one or two thousand miles to the west. If Dole could pick up a time zone or two on his way to the diner, the funder, the rally ... he might have time for a press conference, too — or a stop, somewhere, refueling ... ‘Agh, better make it Kansas.’”
Dole never forsook Kansas, which fared well when appropriations or farm bills or tax bills popped out of Congress. He did, however, neglect his family. One year, his wife remembered sitting down to dinner with him only three or so times. In late 1971, Dole shocked her by saying simply: “I want out.”
He was granted an emergency divorce in Kansas, leaving a dazed wife to mull what happened. (Phyllis Holden Macey, who later married her high school sweetheart, died in 2008.)
Watergate, the 1972 break-in that grew into a nation-gripping scandal, missed ensaring Dole.
“It happened on my night off,” he quipped about the ham-handed attempt to bug the Democratic Party headquarters, by happenstance located in the same complex along the Potomac River where he lived.
Despite Dole’s dedication to Nixon and the RNC job, he was pushed out shortly after the 1972 election. Dole believed that Nixon still liked him, and that he was done in by treacherous West Wing aides. But White House documents released in 1996 by the National Archives and reported by The Washington Post show Nixon ordered his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, to “have some others put the heat on” Dole and make him step down.
While Nixon won reelection by a landslide that November, the GOP remained in the minority in both houses of Congress. Nixon wanted a full time organizer to take charge of the party. Dole was replaced by George H.W. Bush.
Still, as Watergate developed into a Nixon White House cover-up, Dole’s loyalty didn’t wane, even to the final weeks of Nixon’s presidency. That allegiance came back to haunt him in his Senate re-election bid of 1974.
As Nixon’s presidency collapsed in the summer of 1974, Dole career was at risk. His fierce defense of the president, and his RNC chairmanship at the time of the Watergate break-in, linked him inextricably to an administration engulfed by scandal and criminality. Polls showed Democrat Bill Roy, a well-liked two-term House member from Topeka, led Dole by double digits late in the campaign.
In a last-ditch effort, Dole ran a TV spot that became known as “the mudsplat ad.” It featured Dole’s face on a campaign poster and an announcer ticking off Roy’s attacks. With each, a gob of mud whacked the poster until Dole’s face disappeared.
It galvanized the campaign and scandalized Kansans. Late in the race, Dole stunned them again during a debate at the State Fair in Hutchinson by calling Roy an abortionist. Roy, an obstetrician, had performed about a dozen legal abortions over a career of delivering 5,000 babies. Abortion opponents joined the battle and peppered the state with telephone calls and fliers denouncing Roy.
That fall, an exhausted Dole eked out a victory. It was his last close race.
Nixon would advise Dole years later, and the Kansan kept the letters in his Washington desk. In 1994, he would deliver an emotional address at Nixon’s funeral, saying how his friend, as a young man from a poor family in a small town, heard the whistles of the night trains “and dreamed of all the distant places that lay at the end of the track.”
He could have as easily been talking of himself.
Going national
Thanks to a friend’s matchmaking efforts in 1972, Dole met Nixon’s deputy assistant to the president for consumer affairs, a Harvard-educated attorney from North Carolina named Elizabeth Hanford. A romance flourished, and the two were married at the Washington National Cathedral in 1975.
The next year, President Gerald Ford thrust the Kansan onto the national center stage by naming him his running mate at the GOP National Convention in Kansas City. A crowd of 10,000 greeted the nominees in Russell.
On a stage in front of the courthouse where he toiled as county attorney, Dole said he never imagined that one day he’d be on a national ticket.
“But it shows you can come from a small town in America, and you don’t need all the wealth and the material things in this world to succeed, if I’ve succeeded, though some might quarrel with that,” Dole said.
“I want to re-emphasize: If I’ve done anything it’s because of people I’ve known up and down Main Street. And I can recall the time when I needed help, the people of Russell helped. And I think ... ”
Dole halted mid-sentence. His left hand flew up to cover his face. The crowd silenced. He sobbed so hard his shoulders shook. A few claps and cheers came from the crowd. Then President Ford stood up and began to applaud, and the crowd joined in, and for a full half-minute they cheered and shouted and whistled.
“That was a long time ago, and I want to thank you for it again,” Dole said.
Ford adopted a “Rose Garden strategy,” attempting to remain presidential and above the fray while Dole went on the attack against Democratic nominee Jimmy Carter of Georgia.
In the first-ever televised vice presidential debate, he committed a blunder that stuck to him for years.
Debating Sen. Walter Mondale of Minnesota, Dole memorably labeled World War I, World War II, the Korean War and Vietnam “all Democrat wars.”
Mondale retorted, “I think Senator Dole has richly earned his reputation as a hatchet man tonight.” They lost by 2 percentage points, with many pundits blaming Dole’s harsh tone for the defeat.
Undaunted, he returned to the Senate dreaming of the presidency.
In 1980, Dole joined a field of eight Republicans, Ronald Reagan among them, for his first try at the White House. Like all of Dole’s presidential campaigns, it was plagued by disorganization and staff shuffles. It died after he collected just 597 votes in the New Hampshire primary.
“Sometimes I think I never really ran for President in 1980,” he wrote in his joint autobiography with Elizabeth, “Unlimited Partners.”
“Certainly few people seemed aware of my candidacy at the time. There was a lot of talk about the five M’s: money, manpower, management, media and momentum. While my campaign wasn’t broke, it was on the verge of qualifying for food stamps, and and I was too occupied with Senate business to pay much attention to campaign management.’’
Life in the Senate was much smoother. Fortunately for Dole, the Republican takeover that fall elevated him to chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. Over the next three years, he steered a handful of highly controversial tax bills through the committee, trimming Reagan’s three-year, 30% tax cut to 25% and raising a host of taxes on corporate America in a bill he wrote and never boasted about.
Conservatives fumed at Dole’s skepticism towards Reagan’s economic program. But his press coverage improved, and he started to be viewed as an imaginative deal maker and leading force in the Senate.
In 1983, Reagan appointed Elizabeth Dole as Secretary of Transportation. At her confirmation hearing, the Doles sat side by side.
“I regret I have but one wife to give,” he said to gales of laughter, “to the nation’s infrastructure.”
Dole played a key role that year on a presidential commission to bail out the nearly bankrupt Social Security system, helping to broker the final deal that protected the program for at least the next two decades.
On the fourth ballot in 1984, his GOP colleagues elected him Senate majority leader.
Again, his record zigged and zagged across ideological lines. He battled the Reagan White House to improve civil rights and to extend the Voting Rights Act and establish the Martin Luther King Jr. national holiday. He toed the party line opposing economic sanctions against the white apartheid government in South Africa and favored military aid to the Nicaraguan contras fighting to oust the socialist Sandinistas.
He could crack the whip. Once he angrily said, “I did not become majority leader to lose.”
But former Kansas Republican Sen. Nancy Kassebaum recalled Dole’s ability to maintain friendships despite disagreements.
“I knew at times, I was probably a thorn in his side. But it was still possible to be friends and respect the work we were all trying to do, whether we were agreeing or not,” Kassebaum said.
“He had a real wit and he could not be happy about something gone askew,” Kassebaum said. “He knew how he felt about something and he was hopeful others would be positive in that same way.”
Former Sen. Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican who collaborated with Dole as a GOP staffer and later as a member of Congress, joked that the entire Kansas delegation worked for Dole.
Dole returned the loyalty by using his influence to help Kansas colleagues.
“His stature was such and his influence was such he really greased the wheel for about anything anybody wanted to do, but of course you had to go ask him first,” Roberts said.
Dole’s second presidential campaign in 1988 pitted him chiefly against Vice President George H.W. Bush. At times in his career, Dole seemed awed and intimidated by East Coast culture; other times he was sarcastic about Ivy League schools, old money and the family ties that often seemed to open special doors for colleagues, especially Bush.
“It was too much to say that Dole hated Bush, his people gamely insisted,” Newsweek’s Peter Goldman wrote. “But ‘disdain’ was not too strong a word for his feelings; he considered his rival a soft, untested man who coasted through life on his family’s wealth, his Ivied pedigree and his establishment connections.”
Dole won Iowa’s caucuses and rode the wave into New Hampshire, where he had Bush on the ropes. But the surge flattened and his lead dissipated in the final days, as the Bush campaign aired ads suggesting he would raise taxes.
Asked on the night of the vote if he had anything to say to Bush, Dole offered a harsh retort on live national television.
“Stop lying about my record,” he snapped. Critics wrote that the mean Dole was back.
Once Bush won the presidency, Dole surprised many by becoming his most loyal defender. He set a record for beating back Democratic efforts to override a Bush veto two dozen times.
“Pretty heavy buckets,” he quipped about helping Bush.
One of those buckets was the 1990 budget debate. It resulted in Bush’s agreement to raise taxes — and break his most definitive campaign pledge — to get a deal with Democrats.
His work did not go unrewarded. Bush appointed Elizabeth Dole to be labor secretary. They were again Washington’s power couple.
It was Dole in 1991 who persuaded Bush to formally seek congressional approval to go to war against Iraq. Just days after the high-wire endorsement, Bush launched a successful bombardment that eventually drove Iraqi soldiers out of Kuwait.
“The Almanac of American Politics 1996” described Dole as a hard worker and one of the most successful and enduring politicians of the second half of the 20th century:
“He has earned the respect that a politician can win only by persevering through hard times as well as good, by being bloodied by defeat and coming back to fight against the odds and win a victory.”
Over time, Dole wearied of the Senate’s seemingly endless deliberations. The pragmatic dealmaker also found himself increasingly out of step with newer members who preached a harder ideological brand of conservatism.
After a bout with prostate cancer in late 1991, he considered retiring. Dole became an activist for prostate cancer research and exams. He waged a quieter campaign for disabled Americans by setting up a Dole Foundation in 1984. It gave away millions of dollars.
Critics complained the foundation was just one more way for corporate America to buy influence with Dole.
“No good deed goes unpunished,” he said.
One last run for the White House
Bill Clinton’s election in 1992 reinvigorated Dole.
“The good news is that he’s getting a honeymoon in Washington,” he told reporters. “The bad news is Bob Dole is going to be his chaperone.”
Dole pulled together his Republican colleagues to block Clinton’s first big initiative, a $16.3 billion economic stimulus package. He nearly derailed Clinton’s first budget and played a key role in defeating the administration’s attempt to revamp the nation’s health care system.
In the conclusion of his book, “Bob Dole: The Republicans’ Man For All Seasons,” Jake Thompson, The Kansas City Star Washington correspondent who covered Dole’s 1988 and 1996 campaigns, noted the aging pol’s drive.
“After Richard Nixon’s funeral in April of 1994, Republican senators and old Nixon hands boarded their jet. They settled in for the five-hour flight east. At one in the morning Bob Dole looked back from his seat and noticed the captive audience. He walked back to the shake the shoulders of the senators. ‘Let’s talk health care!’ he said.”
When Republicans reclaimed the Senate in 1994, Dole returned as majority leader and soon saw a chance to outflank the first baby boomer president and push him out of the White House. Believing there was no more qualified Republican on the scene, he launched a final bid for the presidency in 1996, characterizing it as “one last mission.”
He had the advantage of money and endorsements from a vast database of contacts he’d painstakingly built over the years. But his record of congressional compromise didn’t always wear well in the ideological trench warfare of the Republican primary. Iowans gave him another caucus victory, but with significantly less support than in 1988. Right wing insurgent Pat Buchanan edged him out in New Hampshire, where he almost finished third behind Lamar Alexander.
“Now I know why they call it the Granite State,” Dole said with a forced smile the next morning in Manchester. “Because it’s so hard to crack.”
Soon, however, his organization began to eliminate rivals one by one. But as he wrapped up the nomination, Democrats bogged him down in the Senate, blocking every initiative he hoped to run on in the fall. A skillful ad campaign tied him to House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who was especially unpopular after a government shutdown.
On May 15, 1996, Dole stunned the Senate by announcing that he was leaving to campaign full time. In perhaps his best speech, he offered a poignant summation of his life.
“My time to leave this office has come and I will seek the presidency with nothing to fall back on but the judgment of the people, and nowhere to go but the White House or home,” he said. “I will then stand before you without office or authority, a private citizen, a Kansan, an American, just a man.
“But I will be the same man I was when I walked into the room and the same man I was yesterday and the day before, and a long time ago when I arose from my hospital bed and was permitted by the grace of God to walk again in the world. And I trust in the hard way, for little has come to me except the hard way, which is good because we have a hard task ahead of us.
“ ... And some might find it surprising, given the view that Congress has been my life, but that is not so. With all due respect to Congress, America has been my life.”
Outside his congressional habitat, Dole still found the going hard. His reservoir of campaign cash evaporated in costly primaries, while Clinton’s operatives beat him unmercifully on the airwaves. Voters were not allowed to forget his age. Dole complained that the nation seemed to be unconcerned about the scandals inside the Clinton administration.
“Whom do you trust?” was Dole’s campaign slogan.
Pundits harped about his unfocused message. Nothing he did seemed to shrink the gender gap. When he embraced the income tax cut, it just seemed to show that he was desperate enough to dump a 35-year reputation as a deficit fighter. Meanwhile, the strong economy gave him no foothold.
In August 1996, Dole delivered an hourlong acceptance address at the Republican convention criticizing the Clinton administration’s record and, in a sense, its baby-boomer morality. He urged America to consider him, a man from a better past, to lead them to a more concrete future.
“Let me be a bridge to an America that only the unknowing call myth,” Dole told the nation.
The speech, however, will be remembered mostly for handing Clinton his own defining theme, one that rang through nearly every speech he gave that fall: Instead of reaching back to the past, Clinton would build “a bridge to the 21st Century.”
The portrait was of a man whose moment for the office had passed.
“This is a good, very decent man. Noble,” said Don Sipple, a longtime Dole media consultant, dropped from the campaign after the convention. “He is a man not of this time. I’m saddened by what this will do to him. ... He thought the presidency was a reward system and he was next in line for the ring.”
Polls showed that Dole had little chance of beating Clinton, whom many in the GOP called the most adroit campaigner in memory. Reform Party candidate Ross Perot also sapped some of the anti-Clinton vote.
Dole’s performance appeared to even threaten the Republican majority in Congress. He ended his last campaign with a 96-hour nonstop marathon, covering 10,000 miles, 20 states and 28 events. In Houston, exhausted and angry that Clinton was about to skate to victory around a welter of ethical and legal issues, he let loose.
“Where’s the outrage in America?” Dole asked. “Where’s the outrage?”
Dole captured much of the South and most of the Mountain and Great Plains states. But he failed to win the prize, California, and lost Florida and Arizona. Clinton amassed 379 electoral votes.
After the election, Dole refused to cast blame. He kept a low profile for months but occasionally reappeared on late-night talk shows to polish his self-deprecating humor.
“Bob, what have you been doing lately?” David Letterman asked.
“Apparently not enough,” said Dole.
His career in politics was over, but Dole’s profile as a pop culture figure was on the rise. He turned up in a Visa card commercial during the 1997 Super Bowl, complaining “I just can’t win.”
Later that month, Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor, for his decades of public life.
World War II memorial
At Verner, Liipfert, Bernhard, Hand Dole made big money for the first time. He and Elizabeth Dole, who had returned to her job as president of the Red Cross, were estimated to be making $1 million a year.Dole made a splash when he lent Gingrich $300,000 to help the embattled speaker pay a penalty for unethical practices.
In July 2003, as he was turning 80, he came to Lawrence for the dedication of the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas. During a celebration at the Lied Center, Dole said he still missed serving in the Senate.
“I thought for certain the Senate would not reopen after I left,” he said. “But they have ... and they haven’t done anything since.”
The following year, Dole was front and center at the dedication of the National World War II Memorial, which might never have been built but for his persistence. After signing on to help raise $100 million, he traveled the country, imploring and cajoling possible donors.
On a rainy day in 2011, several ex-Senate colleagues gathered at the memorial to honor Dole’s efforts and unveil a small bronze plaque.
When it was Dole’s turn to speak, at the end of a long stream of testimonials, he shifted the praise to the men and women who served during the war, and the more than 400,000 who never returned.
“I want to most of all thank the citizen soldiers, the farm and city boys, the factory workers, recent immigrants as diverse as America itself, for all you did to preserve civilization when it was most endangered,” he said.
In the years that followed, Dole advocated for disability rights, among other issues. Despite his best efforts to sway his former colleagues, a majority of Republicans in the Senate opposed a United Nations treaty on disability rights in 2012. He continued to push unsuccessfully for the treaty’s ratification.
Dole remained an active force in Kansas politics for long after his retirement. His endorsement was always gold for the state’s Republicans.
“His political staying power was unmatched. He still swung races. Kansans knew he cared,” said Eric Pahls, who managed Kansas Republican Roger Marshall’s 2020 Senate campaign, a race where Dole’s support proved crucial in a crowded primary.
“Every one of our phone calls ended with a laundry list of questions checking in on what was happening around the state,” Pahls said about Dole’s role in the 2020 campaign.
In 2016, he was the only former Republican nominee for president to attend the Republican National Convention in Cleveland when Donald Trump accepted the nomination for president.
Congress in 2017 recognized Dole’s decades of public service by awarding him the Congressional Gold Medal, its highest civilian honor. He received the medal in 2018 at a ceremony in the Capitol’s rotunda, where President Trump praised him for his work with veterans lauded him as “a patriot, a hero, a leader.”
But Dole broke with the Republican president following the 2020 election when Trump refused to concede the election to Dole’s former Senate colleague, President Joe Biden.
“It’s a pretty bitter pill for Trump, but it’s a fact he lost. It’ll take him a while to accept that,” Dole told The Star in December of 2020, rejecting the conspiracy theories being pushed by Trump and many of the Kansas Republicans Dole had supported, including Marshall.
His tenure as Senate Republican leader was the longest until Mitch McConnell passed him in June 2018.
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