Bob Dole

Russell, Kansas, where his father ran a small creamery. He played basketball, track and football at Kansas, enlisted in 1942, and on April 14, 1945, as a second lieutenant of the 10th Mountain Division taking Hill 913 near Castel d'Aiano in the Apennines, a German shell caught him in the upper back and right arm and shattered his collarbone and part of his spine. I lay face down in the dirt, he said. I could not see or move my arms. I thought they were missing. The men who reached him gave him all the morphine they dared and wrote an M on his forehead in his own blood so that nobody would give him a second, fatal dose. He was 21.

Kansas House at 27, Russell County attorney for eight years, the U.S. House in 1960, the Senate in 1968. He chaired the Republican National Committee through Watergate and was Gerald Ford's running mate in 1976. He ran for president in 1980 and 1988, and in 1996 he took the nomination at 73, the oldest first-time nominee ever, quit the Senate in June to campaign full time, and lost to Bill Clinton. As chairman of Senate Finance in 1982 he drove through the largest peacetime tax increase to that point, selling it as a bill to collect what tax cheats already owed. With George McGovern, whom he had gone after on the Senate floor over Vietnam, he stripped the purchase requirement out of food stamps and later built an international school lunch program. He led Senate Republicans for 11 years.

The arm never came back. Hampar Kelikian, an Armenian orthopedist in Chicago who had lost three sisters in the genocide and a brother killed in Italy in 1943, took Dole as a patient, refused to charge him, and operated seven times between 1947 and 1953, moving bone and muscle from his leg into the shoulder and hand. What could not be repaired Dole managed: he carried a pen in his right fist so nobody would reach out to shake it, and taught himself to write left-handed. In 1990 he was the Senate Republican leader and the loudest Republican voice for the Americans with Disabilities Act, which George H. W. Bush signed on July 26. In December 2012, 89 and in a wheelchair on the Senate floor, he watched a disability rights treaty fall short at 61 votes to 38.

Losing loosened him. Seventy-two hours after conceding he was trading wisecracks with David Letterman, and he went on to sell Viagra and Pepsi on television. He chaired the campaign that raised the money for the National World War II Memorial and then turned up there most Saturdays for years to shake hands with the veterans who came. Clinton gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1997 — he said he had been hoping for the front-door key — and Congress gave him its Gold Medal in 2018. He announced stage four lung cancer in February 2021 and died on December 5 at 98. He lay in state in the Capitol rotunda, went home to Russell, and then to Arlington.

Bob Dole's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Food Stamp Act reform with George McGovern law
  Eliminated the purchase requirement, opening the program to the poorest households 1977
• Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act law
  The largest peacetime tax increase to that date, driven from the Finance Committee 1982
• Americans with Disabilities Act law
  Its loudest Republican advocate in the Senate 1990
• McGovern-Dole International Food for Education Program law
  School meals for children abroad, built with his old Senate opponent 2002
• National World War II Memorial building
  He chaired the fundraising campaign and then greeted visitors there for years 2004
• One Soldier's Story book
  The memoir of the wound and the recovery 2005

• 1941 aged ~18 Leaves Russell for the University of Kansas, recruited by Phog Allen
• April 14, 1945 aged 21 Wounded taking Hill 913 in the Italian Apennines Paralyzed from the neck down, with a fever near 109. Streptomycin, then almost brand new, saved him.
• 1947 aged ~24 Hampar Kelikian begins the first of seven operations on his arm The surgeon refused to take a fee.
• 1960 aged ~37 Elected to the United States House of Representatives
• 1976 aged ~53 Runs for vice president on Gerald Ford's ticket
• July 26, 1990 aged 67 The Americans with Disabilities Act is signed into law
• June 11, 1996 aged 72 Resigns from the Senate to run for president full time He lost to Bill Clinton in November.
• December 4, 2012 aged 89 Wheeled onto the Senate floor for a disability rights treaty that fails It got 61 votes. Ratification needed 66.
• December 5, 2021 aged 98 Dies at 98 He lay in state in the Capitol rotunda four days later.

• George McGovern 1922–2012
  South Dakota senator and 1972 presidential nominee who led opposition to the Vietnam War. allied with
• Bill Clinton b. 1946
  42nd president whose centrist politics, economic agenda, and impeachment shaped the post-Cold War era. defeated by
• Gerald Ford 1913–2006
  38th president who restored basic governmental stability after Watergate and controversially pardoned Richard Nixon. running mate