Second World War veteran who ran for the White House
Bob Dole, who has died aged 98, overcame childhood poverty in the Dust Bowl and grievous wartime injuries to become a giant of Republican politics: he sat in the senate for 25 years, served as Republican senate leader for ten years, and ran for US president in 1996 – losing to Bill Clinton. With a sardonic sense of humour and a tough-guy image, he could be ruthless, but he was known for working across party lines to forge compromises, said The Washington Post. He fought several battles on behalf of the underdog, and though he opposed the big state, he “carried with him a hard-learnt appreciation of what government can do”: government doctors had saved his life; the GI Bill had sent him to college. So while he fought Clinton’s plans to reform the healthcare system, he also supported the expansion of Medicaid for children; he was a driving force behind the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, and a champion of rights for US veterans.
The son of a dairy retailer, Bob Dole was born in rural Kansas in 1923. Money was very tight in the Depression, and by the age of about 12, he had got a part-time job to support his family. A star athlete at school, he went to college to study medicine, but was called up in 1943. In April 1945, he was fighting in Italy’s Apennine Mountains when he was hit by a German shell that smashed his vertebrae and all but tore off one of his arms. Left for dead on a battlefield, he was later sent home in a body cast. He was in and out of hospital for the next 39 months, and he never recovered full use of his arm.
Returning to college, he studied law, and in 1950 he was elected to the Kansas state legislature. He arrived in Washington in 1960. In 1976, Gerald Ford chose him to be his running mate in the election won by Jimmy Carter. Dole then stood for the Republican nomination in 1980, but won just 607 votes in the New Hampshire primary. “The day after, I went home and slept like a baby. Every two hours I woke up and cried,” he quipped. He stood unsuccessfully again in 1988. And when he finally ran as his party’s candidate in 1996, he was trounced. He had promised to be “a bridge to the past”; Clinton replied that he’d be “a bridge to the future”. Dole, who is survived by his second wife Elizabeth Dole, supported Donald Trump for many years, but had recently conceded that he was “sort of Trumped out”.