They shipped him back home, broken and barely alive, a mere fragment of the angular teen who, in the Kansas railroad junction where his father ran a cream-and-egg station, was known for doing a mean jitterbug and was the first person in town to experiment with the new one-handed basketball set shot. But now he was so shattered a figure, encased in a full body cast, that the other passengers on the train – Army men, happy to be stateside again after the Second World War – used what remained of Bob Dole as an ashtray. For his homecoming, his mother picked eight cigarette butts out of the plaster that covered her boy.
That was 76 years ago. Blasted apart on an Italian hillside and injured so badly that he lost 72 pounds and one kidney, Mr. Dole finally succumbed at age 98 Sunday after a life that made him a principal in perhaps more United States history than any American of his age, or maybe even of any age.
He fought in the war that left America pre-eminent in a world far beyond Russell, Kan. He was elected to the House of Representatives the year John F. Kennedy won the White House, served Richard Nixon as chairman of the Republican National Committee, was Gerald Ford’s running mate in the 1976 campaign, held a seat in the Senate for 27 years, ruled the chamber as Senate majority leader, ran for president himself three times, finally winning the GOP nomination in 1996 only to lose to Bill Clinton.
He was cranky but funny. I remember covering a dinner honouring retired Admiral Hyman Rickover where Jimmy Carter, Mr. Ford and Mr. Nixon were at the head table, prompting Mr. Dole to recall the event as the gathering of “Hear No Evil, See No Evil ... and Evil.” He understood the legislative process better than anyone but sometimes could not be understood himself; his vocabulary lacked verbs. He was worldly but provincial; he knew what was happening in Kazakhstan but was focused on Kansas.
And while he manoeuvred for party advantage, he reserved an eye for the national interest; he was the conservative partner to liberal Senator George McGovern in creating food stamps for the poor.
He had witnessed hunger at home and in Europe but liked a good steak. Once, frustrated that he couldn’t angle his hand – left almost useless in his war injury – just right, he asked me to cut his New York strip for him. This was during a fundraising dinner I joined him for, in Columbus, Ohio, just the two of us, a presidential aspirant and a reporter who cadged several hours alone with him in a private jet. It was my birthday, but cutting that steak was a priceless present, a gift just to be asked.
Years later, during the 1996 campaign, former New Hampshire state attorney-general Thomas Rath watched Mr. Dole struggle to put on a necktie. “It captured for me the shared sacrifice that made him and his comrades the Greatest Generation,” Mr. Rath said the other day.
Mr. Dole fought with those of us in the press corps, and we fought back, but those were, in a way, jousts of joy. One of us expressed frustration that the Farm Bill, which requires renewal twice a decade but which none of us fully understood, was taking so long. He shot back: “You like to eat, don’t you?”
He drove his handlers nuts; his second presidential election bid was such an organizational disaster that when we reporters boarded the plane in Illinois we had no idea where we would land. Neither apparently did the pilot. “Fly that way for a while,” Mr. Dole said, flapping his good hand to the south.
He could be mean. When he said, in the 1976 vice-presidential debate with Walter Mondale, that the country had fought “Democrat wars” – breaking the longstanding custom that American wars never were to be considered partisan – he committed more than a gaffe. He said something unforgivable and, to his long regret, unforgettable.
In a way, Mr. Dole was born to be in the Senate, or at least he was patched up to be there.
For two years after he returned home he was hospitalized in the Percy Jones Army Medical Centre in Battle Creek, Mich. On his floor were Daniel Inouye, who lost his arm after being shot in the stomach and hit by an exploding grenade in Italy, and Philip Hart, whose arm still bore shrapnel from an artillery shell on Utah Beach during D-Day. The three would serve in the Senate together. Mr. Dole was the last of the injured trio thrown together in an astonishing coincidence of hospitalization and history.
When a prominent political figure died in 1848, the New York Tribune published a remarkable tribute: “He has been a public servant for more years than any one who survives him; and his career is of inestimable value for the striking proof it affords that a Politician need not be tricky, nor hollow, nor time-serving.”
That was former president John Quincy Adams, of Braintree, Mass., himself the son of a president. But it also was Robert Joseph Dole of Russell, Kan., whose mother made a few extra dollars selling sewing machines in outlying farm areas in the heart of the country her son served for so long.
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David Shribman