DETROIT – Long ago, when he was Senate Majority Leader, I spent most of a day with Bob Dole. Ronald Reagan was in his second term, and Dole wanted to succeed him.
I was working for a Detroit newspaper then, and one of the first things he told me was that he thought Michigan voters ought to see him as one of them. “I should have a head start on those guys,” he said, meaning mainly then-Vice President George Bush.
I knew what he meant. Bob Dole had spent three years in Battle Creek before I was born, in bed and in agony from a terrible wound he suffered in Italy just weeks before World War II ended, enduring operation after operation and infection after infection.
He was expected to die, but didn’t, and a final operation successfully fused his destroyed right arm to his shoulder. His plans for a career as a surgeon were over, but he went into law and then politics instead, though he was still often in pain.
You wouldn’t have known that at first glance; he always kept a piece of paper or a pen in his useless right hand. What I did notice, however, was that his dress shirt pocket was stuffed with dollar bills.
“Well, you know, there’s a sympathetic nerve reaction, and I am losing some feeling in my left hand,” he said. That meant he fumbled with change, and it wouldn’t look good for a would-be president to be dropping quarters. So, when he wanted to buy a paper or a pack of gum, he just handed over a dollar and said “keep the change.”
That was in the long-ago world of 1986, when newspapers cost 50 cents. Did he tell me that story in order to win me over, to make me feel that he was taking me into his confidence?
Perhaps. Did it work? Frankly, yes, to some extent. What impressed me more was that I saw that he could admit mistakes and laugh at himself. (Imagine Donald Trump doing that.) I had strongly disliked Dole the first time I saw him at length, when he was the Republican nominee for vice-president in 1976, and was in the first-ever vice-presidential debate with Walter Mondale.
Dole was at his nastiest worst, and referred to World Wars I, II, Vietnam and Korea as “Democrat wars,” and said “if you added up the number of killed and wounded it would be enough to fill the city of Detroit.” This backfired on him, badly.
When I asked him about it ten years later, he didn’t try to justify it. “I went for the jugular in that debate — my own,” he said, adding, “three empty chairs got up and walked out.”
The ‘hatchet man’ persona came easy to him, early in his career. That was the second time it had hurt him. He had been a bitterly partisan defender of Richard Nixon during most of the Watergate scandal, and it nearly cost him his seat in the Senate in 1974.
But after the “Democrat wars” fiasco, the nation saw not only a mostly nicer Bob Dole, but one who was willing to work with Democrats to get important legislation passed. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) probably couldn’t have passed without him.
Ideologically, it’s hard to imagine a more improbable combination than George McGovern and Bob Dole, but they teamed up in the Senate to pass a bill to ensure that poor children would get lunches in school in impoverished countries across the world.
When Dole finally won the Republican nomination for President in 1996, it was too late and the wrong year. The economy was booming, and he was running against an incumbent President Bill Clinton then yet untouched by the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Dole ran an unfocused campaign, lost badly, but didn’t become bitter. Coincidentally, he lived in a condo in the Watergate next to Lewinsky and her mother. When the media staked out her front door when the scandal broke, Dole opened his door, looked at the cameras and said. “Don’t tell me I won after all?”
Then he sent the reporters donuts.
He went on to lobby for good causes, make scads of money doing TV ads for everything from donuts to Viagra, and worked hard to make the National World War II memorial reality.
Last week he died at 98, not of the injuries that almost killed him in 1945, but from lung cancer; like many men of the greatest generation, he smoked for many years.
He was a loyal Republican; and unlike other living Republicans who once ran for president, he endorsed Donald Trump both in 2016 and 2020. But in an interview last summer, Dole said he was “trumped out,” and tired of the phony election fraud claims.
When I wrote a profile about Dole all those years ago, Democrats as well as Republicans praised him as a senator and a human being, and they did again at his funeral.
They honestly admired him, but I had the sense they were also mourning a politics and an America we no longer have; a world when even the fiercest partisans would get together to get good things done for this nation. He wrote me a note when I reviewed a book he wrote a few years ago that said, simply, “Thank you. God Bless America.”
I’m thankful for having known, however slightly, Bob Dole.
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