At 94, Dole embraces role to greet aging WWII vets
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 94year-old 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 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 him 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.”
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 gently battered by humanity and humidity alike.
“Physically, it takes a toll,” Lohn says, watching his charge from a few feet away with a waiting 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 Republican presidential candidate — this final calling has remained, down to just Saturdays, sometimes derailed by the doctors, but still a duty to be fulfilled.
“It’s just about the one public service left that I’m doing,” Dole 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.
“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.”
Dole’s wife, former Sen. Elizabeth Dole, says her husband is wired to serve.
She joins him frequently on the Saturday outings, helping to direct the receiving line, sharing the tears, doubling the number of former senators in the photos and stories visitors take home.
“I sort of have a propriety interest in the place,” says former 2nd Lt. Dole of the 10th Mountain Division. “It’s another opportunity to say thank you.”