He ran as a Republican because they outnumbered Democrats in the state. He made his first foray into politics in 1950, winning election to the Kansas House of Representatives at 27. He later obtained his undergraduate and law degrees from Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas. His mother sold sewing machines.ĭole was a sophomore at Kansas University when Pearl Harbor was attacked in December 1941, and he joined the Army a year later. His father ran a small restaurant, then worked at a creamery and later at a grain elevator. Robert Joseph Dole was born July 22, 1923, in the farm town of Russell, Kansas, the son of Doran and Bina Dole. “I thank them for their service and, where appropriate, share my experiences as evidence that the only limits to one’s usefulness are self-imposed.” “Most days I’m on the phone congratulating a vet on his birthday or encouraging returning soldiers whose wounds are emotional as well as physical,” Dole wrote. In his 2012 column, Dole reported that, at 89, he still answered every letter he received from military veterans with unmet needs - “to the dismay of staffers trying to decipher my spidery handwriting.” The wound and four-year recovery left Dole “determined to make up the loss by living each day as if it were my last,” he wrote in a 1988 book co-authored with his wife. Friends knew, when greeting Dole with a handshake, to reach out their left hands. He lost the use of his right hand, a disability he tried to make less conspicuous by putting rolled-up paper or a pen in his fingers to keep them from splaying. His collarbone and right arm had been broken, his spinal cord damaged. “For a long moment, I didn’t know if I was dead or alive,” he wrote in “One Soldier’s Story,” his 2005 memoir.

Army’s 10th Mountain Division in Italy.Ī German shell or bullet - he never knew for sure - struck him in the back, near his right shoulder. Some of his political drive stemmed from the wound he received on April 14, 1945, while serving as a second lieutenant with the U.S. He just declared things - And there’ll be no more crime in a Dole administration! - and waited for people to clap as he cleared his throat.” “He never thought aloud in his speeches, never offered the sustained and layered argument that precedes the applause line. “On the stump he seemed like a man caught in a 1983 applause-line factory,” Peggy Noonan, the author and former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, wrote in Time magazine after the election. Ross Perot, running as the nominee of the Reform Party, won 8.4%. Dole made a 15% cut in individual income taxes his centerpiece campaign proposal and tried to energize economic conservatives by picking former Representative Jack Kemp as his running mate.ĭole won 19 states and 40.7% of the vote. So did the 23-year age difference with the younger Clinton. “I will then stand before you without office or authority, a private citizen, a Kansan, an American, just a man,” he said in announcing his decision in May 1996.Īs with many senators who seek the White House, Dole found that his long record of votes on legislation offered grist for his opponents. “No one aspires to be a defeated presidential candidate,” Dole wrote in a column for the Washington Post published in September 2012.ĭuring his final race in 1996, trailing in the polls, Dole took the dramatic step of resigning the Senate seat he had held for more than 27 years. He finally won his party’s support in 1996, only to fall short of defeating Clinton, the incumbent. He lost bids for the Republican presidential nomination in 1980, to Reagan, and 1988, to George H.W.

Tom Daschle, the South Dakota Democrat who faced off with Dole when they led their parties in the Senate, said in a 2000 tribute that Dole’s “sense of fairness and decency is a standard for which everyone in public life should aim.”ĭole struggled to translate his proven skill at Washington’s inside game into success on the most important national political stage. He was a conservative who sometimes wasn’t conservative enough as Christian evangelicals wielded greater power in Republican politics a quipster with an acid tongue who ended up making light of his role as pitchman for an impotence drug and a man who enjoyed the idea that his wife might outdo him in politics. He was the only former GOP presidential nominee to endorse Trump in the 2016 election. He later evolved into an adept legislative deal-maker and softened his public image as half of one of Washington’s first celebrated “Power Couples,” after Ronald Reagan appointed his wife, Elizabeth, U.S. Dole emerged on the national stage as Richard Nixon’s “Hatchet Man,” staunchly defending the president through the early stages of Watergate.

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