Bob Dole, longtime Kansas senator, former U.S. Senate majority leader, the Republican Party’s nominee for vice president in 1976 and its nominee for president in 1996, has died.
Dole was 98. Before becoming an iconic political force, the Kansas native served heroically in World War II.
The New York Times reports:
His death was announced by the Elizabeth Dole Foundation. It did not say where he died. He had announced in February that he had Stage IV lung cancer and that he was beginning treatment.
A Republican, Mr. Dole was one of the most durable political figures in the last decades of the last century. He was nominated for vice president in 1976 and then for president a full 20 years later. He spent a quarter-century in the Senate, where he was his party’s longest-serving leader until Mitch McConnell of Kentucky surpassed that record in June 2018.
As the old soldiers of World War II faded away, Mr. Dole, who had been a lieutenant in the Army’s storied 10th Mountain Division and was wounded so severely on a battlefield that he was left for dead, came to personify the resilience of his generation. In his post-political career, he devoted himself to raising money for the World War II Memorial in Washington and spent weekends there welcoming visiting veterans.
The war put off Dole’s studies and derailed any athletic hopes. A star athlete, legendary coach Phog Allen recruited Dole to play basketball at the University of Kansas after graduating high school in 1941. However, fate had other plans and in 1942 Dole enlisted in the Army.
While fighting on the Italian front in April 1945, a German shell nearly claimed Dole’s life. Lying face down in the mud, he later recounted how he thought his arms were gone.
Soldiers who saw the severity of Dole’s injuries assumed the barrage had mortally wounded him. They wrote the letter “M” on Dole’s helmet—with his blood—hoping a nearby medic would see it and administer morphine to ease his suffering.
However, Dole survived and later graduated from Washburn University in 1952.
Dole’s career in public service was no less distinguished than his military record. In addition to serving in Congress for 35 years, Dole ran for president three times.
Here is his farewell address to his colleagues in the U.S. Senate from June 11, 1996:
In one of his last public appearances, in December 2018, he joined the line at the Capitol Rotunda where the body of former President George H.W. Bush, an erstwhile political rival and fellow veteran, lay in state. As an aide helped him up from his wheelchair, Mr. Dole, using his left hand because his right had been rendered useless by the war, saluted the flag-draped coffin of the last president to have served in World War II.
WATCH:
President Biden has ordered White House flags to half mast to honor the late senator.
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