Bob Dole in Donkey Land

A Republican loyalist and a rare Democratic stronghold in his home state of Kansas created a fraught but enduring partnership.

Bob Dole: Soldier, Statesman, and American. Illustration by Torren Thomas. Photography in this article by Carter Gaskins. Archival photography courtesy Library of Congress.

I first met Bob Dole when I was 12. I was excited to serve that week as a Kansas House of Representatives legislative page who was paid to fetch and carry for the lawmakers. There were many distinguished gray-haired legislators who had been there for years, but it was the young ones, most of whom had served in the war, who impressed me the most.

Both Dole and my father, L. Lew Henry, each a World War II combat-wounded veteran, had just been elected to the Kansas House. To me, they were young, handsome, and heroic. Another similarity was that their injuries kept them from fulfilling their dreams to become doctors. My father rarely spoke of his military service, so, at that time, I likely knew more about Dole’s service than my father’s. What I didn’t already know about Dole’s military service and political career, I later learned from his memoir, One Soldier’s Story.

Both Dole and my father, L. Lew Henry, each a World War II combat-wounded veteran, had just been elected to the Kansas House. To me, they were young, handsome, and heroic.

That Dole, who served as a lieutenant with the 10th Mountain Division in Italy’s Apennine Mountains, had been grievously wounded was obvious. He was thin, and his right arm was paralyzed as a result of the shell that shattered his shoulder, fractured his collarbone and damaged his spine. Before the war he had been a six-foot-two, 192-pound athlete at KU, competing in football, track and basketball, his favorite sport.

He was wounded April 14, 1945, when his unit moved through a valley under heavy machine gun fire. Losing men, Dole looked for his radioman to call for reinforcements. The radioman, still clutching his radio, was slumped over and covered in blood. Dole crawled toward him, intending to pull him into the safety of a shell hole, when he was struck. Dole’s men pulled him behind a wall. His sergeant administered a dose of morphine and, using Dole’s own blood, drew an M on his forehead, so when the medics found him they would not give him another dose, which might prove fatal.

It was six hours before he was removed from the battlefield.

Dole had hoped to return to KU after the war as a student-athlete. Instead, he spent the next three years and three months in hospitals, enduring surgery after surgery, including one to remove an infected kidney that shot his fever to 109 degrees and almost killed him. At one point, he weighed only 122 pounds.

When he accepted the fact that his life was changed forever, he decided to make the most of what he had left, rather than bemoaning what he had lost. Gradually, he regained the ability to walk, with only his right arm remaining paralyzed.

Dole served only one term in the Kansas House before being elected county attorney in Russell County, an office he held eight years before being elected to Congress in 1960 and reelected three times. When he learned that US senator Frank Carlson planned to retire in 1968, Dole threw his hat in the ring and defeated former governor William Avery to win the Republican nomination.

He then won the US Senate seat with 60% of the votes. He was reelected to that seat four times.

People often talk about how Dole, though involved in politics at the highest level, still kept in touch with his friends and constituents. I know this is not a political myth. In 1973, my dad died of a brain tumor that his Menninger neurosurgeon said originated from a head injury in World War II. I wanted to learn more about that injury but knew many military records were lost in a fire earlier that year at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis.

When he learned that I was searching for these records, Senator Dole had Dad’s few records that escaped the fire sent to Wichita so I didn’t have to drive so far to view them. It was typical of his thoughtfulness.

In both of Dole’s senate runs in the 1980s, I managed Douglas County Republican Headquarters in Lawrence. During one of them, we set up a booth for all GOP candidates at Baldwin City’s popular Maple Leaf Festival. Another worker and I were stationed at a smaller table, covered by a long tablecloth, a couple blocks away. That table was devoted solely to Dole’s campaign literature, plus we gave out cups of Dole pineapple juice to those who stopped to look and chat. Many passersby asked if he owned the Dole Company and we told them that he did not.

When Dole finished riding in a decorated car in the parade, he visited our table. We had run out of Dole juice and were substituting another brand that we hid under the table, only bringing it out to quickly fill cups. He thanked us for our help and stayed there quite a while, visiting with people who stopped to talk with him. If he noticed there were no cans of Dole pineapple juice prominently displayed on the table, he did not mention it.

During his fifth US Senate term, Dole resigned to run for president in 1996. He easily won the primary in a crowded field but lost to incumbent President Bill Clinton in the general.

Dole lost his chance at the White House but never his humor.

A Visa commercial featured Dole returning to the small town of Russell, where he grew up and worked as a soda jerk. Because he was widely known and loved, in the ad he was warmly and enthusiastically welcomed home until he tried to pay for his lunch with a check—and the woman who had been reminiscing with him and calling him “Bob,” asked for his ID.

When President Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom only two months after defeating him, Dole began his acceptance speech by saying, “I, Robert J. Dole, do solemnly swear,” beginning the presidential oath of office before saying, “Wrong speech.” He later joked that the award he expected to be getting was the key to the White House.

He appeared on Leno and Letterman, leaving audiences in stitches. Leno in his monologue called actress Susan Lucci, who failed to win an award after being nominated for the seventeenth time, “the Bob Dole of daytime television.” Dole then walked out from behind the curtain and said, “Bob Dole doesn’t like that joke. Bob Dole is fed up. Bob Dole has had five years of this, Leno…” before breaking up in laughter.

Dole recounted that Late Night experience in his book, One Soldier’s Story, published in 2005, which he autographed for me. His habit of referring to himself in the third person was often parodied, and he wrote in the book, “I don’t know how or why I ever started doing such a silly thing in the first place. False humility, I guess.”

When KU’s Dole Institute of Politics opened in 2003, it included a wall of pictures of WWII veterans. The war and its aftermath were a defining part of Dole’s life, but he chose to share that honor with others who had served.

When President Clinton asked Dole to be the national chairman of the World War II Memorial Campaign, he jumped at the chance. After the memorial opened in 2004, Senator Dole tried to meet and visit with WWII veterans from every Kansas Honor Flight touring the memorial—even when he required the use of a wheelchair.

In 2006, the WWII Ranger Battalions held their national reunion in Lawrence at my invitation. I had earlier contacted Senator Dole, who agreed to be the speaker at the Rangers’ Saturday night banquet. Unfortunately, he developed a health issue, and his doctors refused to allow him to make the trip. I was worried about getting a speaker at such late notice, but Dole saved the day by asking General David Petraeus, then commander at Fort Leavenworth, to speak in his place.

My last communication with Dole was on November 3, 2021, when he, or someone using his email, asked me to resend my request for him to endorse a Congressional Gold Medal for WWII Rangers. I complied but did not hear from him again. He died a month later, on December 5, 2021.

When someone told Bob Dole that he was a hero, he answered the way my father did when someone referred to him as a hero: “The heroes are still over there” or “The heroes never came home.”

With all due respect, I beg to differ.

The Politician’s Lawrence Legacy

By Haines Eason with additional reporting by Elizabeth Walters

Robert Dole’s connection to Lawrence represents a strange union between a loyal Republican who endorsed all his party’s candidates up to Donald J. Trump and one of the state’s bluest Democratic strongholds.

It’s a relationship that weathered, to some degree, tremendous political upheaval.

When Bob Dole entered Congress in 1961, Lawrence was still very much like the rest of Kansas—reliable moderate Republican territory.

Former University of Kansas professor Dennis Domer notes that he and many Kansas students of that era grew up as political moderates in Eisenhower-era households.

“Most of us did,” he says. “I came out of a Republican family.”

But as the war in Vietnam escalated, a shift began in Lawrence. American college campuses became centers of activism, and KU, which Dole attended prior to WWII, was no exception. 

In March 1965, students staged a fair-housing picket and sit-in outside of Chancellor Wescoe’s office. In an interview with KU’s Kenneth Spencer Research Library staff, historian Rusty L. Monhollon notes this action “was perhaps the most successful civil rights protest ever in Lawrence.”

By December 1965, protestors in town were publicly questioning what victory in South Vietnam would look like. They opposed the policies of President Lyndon B. Johnson, and they had little trust in the promised peace plans of Richard Nixon.

After Richard Nixon took the presidency in 1969, he increasingly relied on the World War II hero from Russell—now a US senator—to carry the banner for war.

“Dole, he quickly became a spokesperson for President Nixon,” says former KU professor Bill Tuttle, who arrived in 1967 as Dole’s prominence rose.

After only two years in the Senate, Dole became the chair of the Republican National Convention in 1971. “He really had to support it all,” Tuttle says.

But in Lawrence, a new generation was discovering that they didn’t have to support it all—or any of it.

“The younger generations, they pushed to see the establishment of Black studies, Latin American studies. They championed women’s rights,” Domer notes. “This era saw the establishment of new departments around these ideas and movements—reproductive rights, human rights in general.” 

And, for Tuttle, one particular Dole memory stands out. It was 1972, and Dole came to KU to speak on the Vietnam War.

Tuttle remembers a raucous crowd, boos, real anger at Dole for bringing his conservative, and, in the eyes of the campus community, out-of-touch views to town. He also feels Dole seemed to enjoy the sparring as it gave him something to take back to his western Kansas base.

“In all honesty, he seemed to really just want to get Lawrence agitated,” Tuttle says.

At that time, Dole’s traditional politics held sway—even in Lawrence. “You have the University of Kansas, which becomes in the ’60s and ’70s kind of a symbol of that era. Liberalism, hippies, drugs, whatever. But the rest of the community remains pretty conservative throughout that period,” notes historian Virgil Dean, who has worked with the Dole Institute and tracked Dole’s political career closely. “Looking back at election returns, for example, in ’72, Douglas County—I don’t have a breakdown for Lawrence, but Lawrence was a big majority of Douglas County—went for Nixon and Agnew.”

The big shift would begin from 1972 to 1974.

“Watergate hits, and then the election of ’74,” Dean says.

“That’s dragging Dole down.”  Dole went out of his way in 1973 to tell the besieged Nixon he felt Watergate would blow over. Nixon’s own papers cite a May 22 visit by Dole where the Kansan offered personal encouragement.

In all honesy, [Dole] seemed to really just want to get Lawrence agitated.

Bill Tuttle

By 1974, when Dole won statewide in his first Senate reelection, Dean goes so far as to say Dole was probably on course to lose. The campaign turned nasty in the end, and Dole turned to the emerging anti-abortion crowd to carry the day.

A June 1996 New York Times story looking into Dole’s past focused on the 1974 campaign. “Abortion, Dole’s Sword in ’74, Returns to Confront Him in ’96,” the headline reads.

Times reporter Elizabeth Kolbert reported the ’74 campaign was, at that point, Kansas’ most expensive. And, she noted, it “may still rank as the ugliest.” 

“It began with insinuations of corruption and incompetence and soon escalated to accusations of slander and sleazy campaigning,” she wrote. “It featured, quite literally, a round of televised mudslinging. And it ended with a last-minute barrage of leaflets distributed anonymously. The leaflets featured pictures of discarded fetuses in garbage cans. ‘Vote Dole,’ they said.”

Dole did carry Kansas in ’74 by a small margin, but he lost Douglas County fairly significantly.

“But that’s the only time,” Dean says. “After that, he rebounds.”

Jerry Seib, a Hays native who worked as a journalist at the Wall Street Journal for nearly 45 years and recently served as a research fellow at the Dole Institute, notes that attitudes toward Dole on the KU campus had softened by the time Seib graduated in 1978.

“The campus political environment was very much left of Bob Dole,” Seib says. “I would say even in those days there was a grudging respect for Bob Dole because he was an accomplished national politician who had done a lot for the state, whatever you thought about his politics at the 10,000-foot level, he had done an enormous amount of good for the state, and that was respected.”

Tuttle notes that Dole seemed to change some after the war. “He became closer to George McGovern on issues on food stamps, poverty, hunger,” Tuttle says of Dole’s political partnership with the senator from South Dakota and Democratic presidential candidate in 1972.

Dole lobbied for tax increases, seeing one enacted in 1982, a surprising move for a Republican of any era. And, Dole was an ardent supporter of the landmark 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act.

Seib also tells Washington folklore that attributes Dole’s 1975 marriage to Elizabeth Hanford, who would later become Senator Elizabeth Dole, to “softening” the senator’s political views.
“I think he would tell you that also; we have had that conversation,” Seib recalls.

Seib says his relationship with the senator evolved over the years throughout his work reporting on national politics. “I think not just my impressions, but I think the general perception of Dole changed a lot over the years, and that’s why I find him such an interesting person,” Seib says. “He went from having a reputation as kind of a partisan slasher, to being probably the best legislator of his generation.” 

That evolution almost allowed Dole to carry Douglas County during his 1996 presidential run. Douglas County went for Clinton/Gore in ’96, but it was close—only by about 2,000 votes. Domer says by that time, Lawrence had become “the blue island that we think about now.”

As time wore on and the Republican party lurched more and more to the right through the Gingrich years and beyond, did Dole remain a moderate?

His work at the Senate featured compromises but also earned him the nickname of “Mr. Gridlock” for stalling Democratic proposals.In 2004, he joined in the smears against Vietnam War veteran and Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. He also went so far as to endorse Trump in 2016, a move that, in 2021, Politico noted was signature for a man who had always been a die-hard party loyalist. “He was a Republican whose party loyalty was immutable; so much so that in 2016, he was the only one of the five living previous GOP presidential nominees to endorse Donald Trump,” the article reads.

Tuttle himself gives Dole some room on his Trump endorsement. “I think that’s probably just Dole as a Republican,” Tuttle notes.

By the time he died, Dole had begun expressing less support for Trump, but never fully repudiated Trump’s politics or legacy.

Asked point blank if Dole was Mr. Compromise or Mr. Gridlock, Domer says, “Mr. Compromise.” But, he adds, “Dole was no McCain,” a reference to the late Senator John McCain who spoke out against many of Trump’s political policies—at some cost to his own influence in the Republican party.

But refraining from those types of gestures—whether morally right or wrong—was consistent with Dole’s strategic practicality.

In the end, Dole was interested in governing, notes Dean. “He was very conservative, but he learned in D.C. he had to compromise to get things done.”

This story is adapted from an article in the fall 2023 edition of Lawrence Magazine.