Bob Dole
Robert Joseph Dole was an American politician, attorney, and U.S. Army officer who represented Kansas in the United States Senate from 1969 to 1996. He was the Republican Leader of the U.S Senate during the final 11 years of his tenure, including three non-consecutive years as Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate. Prior to his 27 years in the Senate, he served in the United States House of Representatives from 1961 to 1969. Dole was also the Republican presidential nominee in the 1996 presidential election and the vice presidential nominee in the 1976 presidential election.
Dole was born and raised in Russell, Kansas, where he established a legal career after serving with distinction in the United States Army during World War II. Following a period as county attorney for Russell County, he won election to the House of Representatives in 1960. In 1968, Dole was elected to the Senate, where he served as chairman of the Republican National Committee from 1971 to 1973 and chairman of the United States Senate Committee on Finance from 1981 to 1985. He led the U.S. Senate Republican members from 1985 to his resignation in 1996, and served as Senate Majority Leader from 1985 to 1987 and from 1995 to 1996. In his role as Republican leader, he helped defeat the Clinton health care plan of 1993, proposed by Democratic president Bill Clinton.
President Gerald Ford chose Dole as his running mate in the 1976 election after Vice President Nelson Rockefeller withdrew from seeking a full term. The Ford–Dole ticket was defeated by the Democratic ticket of Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale in the general election. Dole sought the Republican presidential nomination in 1980, but quickly dropped out of the race. He experienced more success in the 1988 Republican primaries but was defeated by Vice President George H. W. Bush. Dole won the Republican presidential nomination in 1996 and selected Jack Kemp as his running mate. The Republican ticket lost in the general election to Clinton. He resigned from the Senate during the 1996 campaign and did not seek public office again after the election.
Dole remained active after retiring from public office. His second wife Elizabeth served one term as U.S. Senator from North Carolina from 2003 to 2009. Dole appeared in numerous commercials and television programs and served on various councils, including the advisory council for the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and special counsel at the Washington, D.C., office of law firm Alston & Bird. In 2012, he unsuccessfully advocated Senate ratification of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Dole was the only former Republican presidential nominee to endorse Donald Trump in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, though he initially supported Jeb Bush in the 2016 Republican Party presidential primaries. Dole was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal on January 17, 2018.
Early life and education
Dole was born on July 22, 1923, in Russell, Kansas, the son of Bina M. and Doran Ray Dole. His father, who had moved the family to Russell shortly before Robert was born, earned money by running a small creamery. One of Dole's father's customers was the father of his future U.S. Senate colleague Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania. The Doles lived in a house at 1035 North Maple in Russell and it remained his official residence throughout his political career.Dole graduated from Russell High School in the spring of 1941 and enrolled at the University of Kansas the following fall. Dole had been a star high school athlete in Russell, and Kansas basketball coach Phog Allen traveled to Russell to recruit him to play for the Jayhawks basketball team. While at KU, Dole was on the basketball team, the track team, and the football team. In football, Dole played at the end position. In 1942 he was a teammate of the founder and longtime owner of the Tennessee Titans Bud Adams, Adams's only season playing football at Kansas. While in college, Dole joined the Kappa Sigma fraternity, and in 1970 he was bestowed with the Fraternity's "Man of the Year" honor. Dole's collegiate studies were interrupted by World War II, when he enlisted in the United States Army.
Dole attended the University of Arizona in Tucson from 1948 to 1949, before transferring to Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas, where he graduated with both undergraduate and law degrees in 1952.
World War II and recovery
Dole joined the United States Army's Enlisted Reserve Corps in 1942 to fight in World War II. He was stationed at Brooklyn College in New York City from December 1943 through April 1944 as part of the Army Specialized Training Program, before 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 that struck 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, they believed all they could do was "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. Having blood clots, a life-threatening infection, and a fever of almost, he was expected to die. After large doses of penicillin were not successful, he overcame the infection with the administration of streptomycin, one of the first ever uses of that drug in a human. 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".
File:Bob Dole and Daniel Inouye at Percy Jones Army Hospital.jpg|thumb|left|Friend and future senator Daniel Inouye with Dole playing cards while recovering at Percy Jones Army Hospital in the mid-1940s.
Dole recovered from his wounds at the Percy Jones Army Hospital in Battle Creek, Michigan. 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 Senate members: Dole, Philip Hart from Michigan, and Daniel Inouye from Hawaii. Dole was decorated three times, receiving two Purple Heart medals 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 minimized 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.
Early political career
Dole ran for office for the first time in 1950 and was elected to the Kansas House of Representatives, serving a two-year term. During his term he served on the following committees: Assessment and Taxation, Gas and Oil, and Military Affairs and Soldiers Compensation. He became the county attorney for Russell County in 1953. Dole was elected to the United States House of Representatives from Kansas's 6th congressional district in 1960. After his first term, Kansas lost a congressional district, and most of Dole's district was merged with the neighboring 2nd district to form a new 1st district, encompassing much of central and western Kansas. Dole was elected from this merged district in 1962 and was re-elected two more times.During his tenure in the House, Dole voted in favor of both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Civil Rights Act of 1968, as well as the Twenty-fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
U.S. Senate (1969–1996)
In 1968, Dole defeated former Governor of Kansas William H. Avery for the Republican nomination for the United States Senate to succeed retiring Senate member Frank Carlson. He subsequently won the seat in the general election. Dole was re-elected in 1974, 1980, 1986, and 1992, before resigning on June 11, 1996, to focus on his presidential campaign.While in the Senate, Dole served as chairman of the Republican National Committee from 1971 to 1973, the ranking Republican on the United States Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry from 1975 to 1978, and the chairman of the United States Senate Committee on Finance from 1981 to 1985. In November 1984, Dole was elected Majority Leader of the United States Senate, defeating Ted Stevens 28–25, in the fourth round of balloting.
File:U.S. SENATOR FROM KANSAS ROBERT DOLE, STANDS ON A PICK-UP TRUCK BED WHICH IS ONE OF THE PARADE UNITS IN COTTONWOOD... - NARA - 557059.jpg|thumb|Dole in Emporia, Kansas, 1974. Photo by Patricia DuBose Duncan.
The continuing war in Vietnam was the dominant source of political division on Capitol Hill in the early 1970s; in 1970 Democratic U.S. Senator George McGovern of South Dakota took the Senate floor and condemned the role of the deliberative assembly in maintaining the U.S. presence in Vietnam, saying the Senate chamber "reeks of blood", soon followed by freshman Republican senator Dole on the floor, who vociferously attacked McGovern. Dole was appointed chair of the Republican National Committee the next year. Over time in the Senate, Dole was seen by some as having a moderate voting record. During the following years of the 1970s, Dole and McGovern worked together on the Senate Hunger and Human Needs Committee. They partnered to help pass legislation making food stamps and school lunches more accessible, and fraud more difficult. They expanded the school lunch program and helped establish the Special Supplemental Food Program for Women, Infants and Children, a federal assistance program for low-income pregnant women, breast-feeding women and children under the age of five.
Dole served on congressional agriculture committees throughout the course of his political career, and became the Republican Party's chief spokesman on farm policy and nutrition issues in the Senate. When Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, Dole held the chairmanship of the Senate Agriculture Committee's Nutrition Subcommittee and the Senate Finance Committee. Together with McGovern, Dole spearheaded the elimination of the purchase requirement to receive food stamp benefits and the simplification of eligibility requirements.
Facing a reluctant President and Congress as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee in 1982, Dole was the driving force behind a large tax increase, promoting it as a reform measure to collect money owed by tax cheats and under-taxed businesses. In December of that year, The New York Times referred to Dole as changing from "hard-line conservative" to "mainstream Republicanism". He became Senate Majority leader in 1985 initially serving in that position for two years. Democrats took control of the Senate following the 1986 United States Senate elections, and Dole became Senate Minority Leader for the next eight years. Dole was a major supporter and advocate of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.
The Republicans took control of both the Senate and House of Representatives in the 1994 midterm elections, due to the fallout from President Bill Clinton's policies including his health care plan, and Dole became Senate Majority Leader for the second time. In October 1995, a year before the presidential election, Dole and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich led the Republican-controlled Congress to pass a spending bill that President Clinton vetoed, leading to the federal government shutdown from 1995 to 1996. On November 13, Republican and Democratic leaders, including Vice President Al Gore, Dick Armey, and Dole, met to try to resolve the budget and were unable to reach an agreement. By January 1996, Dole was more open to compromise to end the shutdown, but he was opposed by other Republicans who wanted to continue until their demands were met. In particular, Gingrich and Dole had a tense working relationship as they were potential rivals for the 1996 Republican nomination. Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos cited the shutdown as having a role in Clinton's successful re-election campaign. In a January 3, 1996, Briefing Room address, amid the ongoing United States federal government shutdowns of 1995–1996, President Clinton noted Dole as a lawmaker that was "working together in good faith" to reopen the government.
From 1992 to 1996, Dole played a major role in mobilizing support for Bosnia and Herzegovina in the Senate, and pressuring the Clinton administration and NATO to resolve the war there.
In 1996, Dole was the first sitting Senate Party Leader to receive his party's nomination for president. He hoped to use his long experience in Senate procedures to maximize publicity from his rare positioning as Senate Majority Leader against an incumbent president but was stymied by Senate Democrats. Dole resigned his seat on June 11, 1996, to focus on the campaign, saying he had "nowhere to go but the White House or home".