Dole’s last mission is at WWII memorial
Each Saturday, before Bob Dole sets off on his latest vocation, he has cornflakes, a little sugar on top, and a bottle of chocolate Boost.
It takes less time to get dressed now that the 94-yearold allows a nurse to help him, but it remains a rough half-hour on a body racked by injury and age. The blue oxford has to be maneuvered over the dead right arm and the shoulder that was blown away on an Italian hillside. The pressed khakis over the scarred thigh. A pair of North Face running shoes, the likes of which his artillery-blasted hands have been unable to tie since 1945.
Then comes the hard part — getting there. On this particular June Saturday, the Lincoln Town Car with the Kansas plates is unavailable, so Nathanial Lohn, the former Army medic who serves as Dole’s nurse, helps the nonagenarian into Lohn’s Honda Insight. It’s tight, but good enough for the 20-minute drive to a monument the former senator all but built himself.
There, from a handicapped parking spot, he eases into the wheelchair as the greetings begin — “Oh my gosh, Bob Dole!”— finally rolling into his place in the shade just outside the main entrance to the National World War II Memorial.
And then they come, bus after bus, wheelchair after wheelchair, battalions of his bent brothers, stooped with years but steeped in pride, veterans coming to see their country’s monument to their sacrifice and to be welcomed by of one of their country’s icons.
“Good to see you. Where you from?” Dole says, over and over, as they roll close, sometimes one on each side. New York, Tennessee, Nevada, the old roll call once again. “Let’s get a picture.” “Thank you for your service.” “What about your service?” “How old are you?” I’m 90.” “I’m 94.” “Good to see you.”
He’ll do it for more than three hours on this muggy day, more than six hours on others, staying until the last veteran has gone on by to see the grand columns and fountains behind him. They pump his left hand — the one with some numb feeling left — and squeeze his shoulders, and sometimes he gets home not just tired but battered by humanity and humidity.
“Physically, it takes a toll,” Lohn says, watching his charge from a few feet away with a bottle of water. “I may find five new bruises on him tonight. But he won’t miss it.”
Dole has been coming for years — weather and his health permitting — to greet these groups of aging veterans, brought at no cost from throughout the country by the nonprofit Honor Flight Network. As the many missions of a mission-driven life have faded into history — combat hero, champion for the disabled, Senate majority leader, 1996 GOP presidential candidate — this final calling has remained, down to just Saturdays, sometimes derailed by the doctors, but a duty.
“It’s just about the one public service left that I’m doing,” he says. “We don’t have many of the World War II vets left. It’s important to me.”
But it’s important for him, too. He seems to get more energized with each encounter, frail in his chair but his right eyes locking in on the next old tail gunner or rifleman or supply corps clerk trundling toward him.
“I tell them it doesn’t matter where you’re from, what war you served in, whether you were wounded or not wounded,” Dole says. “We’re all in this together.”
He has watched the proportion of World War II veterans fall over the years, from half the bus to just a few per group, the sun setting on the generation that saved the world.
“I just met a fellow who was 103 years old,” he says. “Sometimes I’m the kid.”
Maybe it keeps him young, these Saturdays in the shade of history and heroism. Lohn thinks they do, with this year a vast improvement over 2017, when serious health problems kept Dole grounded for months. Dole’s wife, former Sen. Elizabeth Dole, says her husband is wired to serve.
She joins him frequently on the outings, helping direct the receiving line, sharing tears, doubling the number of Senator Doles in the pictures and stories visitors take home.