In 1923 Robert Dole
was born in Russell, Kansas. Dole was
an active child and became aggressively involved in sports and athletics. As a teenager during the Depression, he worked
at a small pharmacy in hopes of furthering a medical career. Soon after graduating
high school, he enrolled as a full time student at the University of Kansas
declaring himself as a pre-med major.
Bob Dole’s dreams were abruptly cut short by America’s engagement in
World War II. After entering in the
Army’s officer training school, he was deployed to Italy. During his time
overseas, he was wounded on Hill 913 by German gunfire in northern Italy. He spent several years recovering
stateside. When he had fully recovered,
he enrolled at Washburn University, graduated with a Bachelor’s of Arts degree
and then went on to receive a law degree.
Bob Dole spent a total of thirty-six years holding a variety of jobs in
the political arena: GOP National
Chairman, Republican Vice-Presidential candidate in 1976, Senate Majority
Leader, and the Republican Presidential candidate in 1996. Mr. Dole has now retired from an active
political career and is currently serving as legal counsel in a Washington D.C.
law firm. My greatest appreciation goes
out to Mr. Dole for the time he donated to make this paper possible.
Well, my childhood was like a lot of people’s. We lived out in western Kansas. We had dust storms during those days, not many families had a lot of money. Everybody worked hard. We were just trying to survive in a sense. My parents--there were four children and my mother and father--both worked. My mother sold sewing machines, and my dad ran a cream and egg station. We were just good, average people making it from day to day. We had a good family, good parents, and good teachers.
I worked, starting in eighth grade and until graduation, in a drug store. I was pretty active in athletics and really never thought much about politics. My parents weren’t active, didn’t have the money to get involved; but it sort of happened when I came back from World War II.
I think the best [memory of serving in World War II] is I was just a young guy getting to meet other young guys from all over the country. When you come from a little town like Russell, you’ve really never been on an airplane, never ridden a bus, never been too far from home. Suddenly you’re in Brooklyn College or Camp Breckenridge in Kentucky, or Camp Polk in Louisiana, or wherever it might be. You’re meeting a different kind of people [in] different parts of the country and you make a lot of friends. Of course when you’re young, eighteen or nineteen, you don’t know the big picture. We sort of learned it. All we knew was we were in the Army. I was a 2nd Lieutenant, I did what I was told, and that’s sort of the way it works. You sit back and think about it ten, twenty or thirty years later and you see how important World War II was and what would have happened if we lost. Where would we be today? What would we all be doing? Would there be a university in Pittsburg, and all the other things. It’s the big event of the century, and had we not prevailed I don’t know what would have happened to America. So, you think about all of that in your later years. You don’t really understand when you’re nineteen or twenty years old. I think that’s what I learned about America--its strength, its people and its compassion. The same thing we’re doing today in the War on Terrorism. We’re trying to feed the Afghans and help people at the same time we’re trying to stop terrorism.
The hardest part, of course, was the recovery period of being wounded in Italy. It was pretty difficult, at least the way I came home. I think when you left you were young and vibrant, full of life; [but when] you come home, [you] can hardly walk and can’t use your arms.
I think initially people didn’t know how to approach me. I was badly hurt, and I’d lost about seventy or eighty pounds. I was pretty skinny and I couldn’t do much for myself. After awhile, it sort of became the neighborhood challenge. I remember one farmer, Henry Wigley, brought in a live duck, which obviously we ate. People did everything to help. My dad brought things home from the cream station, and we played a lot of bridge in those days. I’d keep people up until two or three in the morning because I could sleep all day. I think they were all good friends. Others had lost relatives or somebody in the war. So, I think at the time I was lucky. You were alive in a sense, but unlucky because you had a lot of problems. Overall, you were better off than the ones--your friends--who didn’t make it back at all.
It’s [being wounded] a dramatic change in your life, but again you have to meet the challenge, meet the test, get out and give it another shot. There are a lot of things you’d like to do that you couldn’t do. I thought athletics were the greatest thing in my life. Then I couldn’t do any of those things so I had to try something else. I decided I’d go to law school--use my head instead of my hands. I had great grades because I had a recording machine that I took to class. I took great notes; and I was always very popular around test time. I really applied myself. Before KU, that’s when I went into the service, a lot of us didn’t go to class. We went to farewell parties; we didn’t really contribute much to the university. But we knew when we came back that we had to get it done. We were in our twenties, and we had our whole lives ahead of us; and we had to really make it work. We had to bear down and study.
We had a law librarian named Beth Bowers at Washburn Law School. She was a Democrat, and was trying to talk about four of us into running for the state legislature. She thought young people ought to be involved in politics. She convinced me it was a good idea. So, I ran for the State House of Representatives in 1951. I served in the State legislature in the 1951 session. There was an incumbent Democrat who thought he was on his way to being Governor. His name was Elmo Mahoney. [That was] my first political race. Beth Bowers passed away about three years ago.
I never thought much about politics. I had other people write to me saying, “You ought to get involved. You ought to run.” I didn’t know anything about politics. My parents weren’t active. So that’s how I got involved. I remember both the Democrats and the Republicans visiting me in Russell, each suggesting I should run as a Democrat or Republican. I finally decided to run as a Republican. I had a friend that passed away by the name of John Woelk, he was active in politics, and he was a Republican and World War II veteran. I didn’t have any strong leanings at the time. Figured if it was good enough for him, [it was good enough for me].
I think obviously [the highest honor is] getting the nomination, or getting your party’s nomination, for President of the United States. I think that’s when you’ve reached the top of the mountain as far as your party is concerned. There are a lot of great things that happened along the way, lot of hard work, lot of disappointments, lot of good times, bad times. I think when you boil it all down, the best part of it is just going to places like Pittsburg, Russell, Goodland, or Dodge City. Just hanging around with the people, meeting the people, and trying to solve some of their problems is really worth it. That’s the part of politics I liked the best, the people part.
I try to be closely tied [to Kansas] and we still get letters, phone calls, and people wanting us to do things. We try to help out even though I don’t have the staff I had in Congress. I [attempt to] talk to Senator Roberts, Senator Brownback, or whoever [their] Congressman might be. That’s how we stay in touch. But a lot of people know my name, or they knew me, or their parents knew me; and then I write to Sam or Pat or sometimes I can do it on my own. We get quite a bit of mail from Kansas. Still have friends there.
I still have a lot of my division friends. These old guys they like to go to reunions. I’m not much of a reunion guy. We still have contact. In fact, my old division is now in Uzbekistan. Just yesterday I wrote a note to the Secretary of Defense, Secretary Rumsfeld, saying, “If you’re planning any holiday visits to the Old 10th Mountain Division in Uzbekistan, let me know and I’ll be happy to go along.” But we still keep pretty active, doing a lot of work on the World War II memorial. I was the Chairman of the project, and we’ve raised about 185 million dollars. That’s under construction.
Korea? We should have been involved. Of course, I believe it was sort of a forgotten war. We lost some 37,000 plus Americans and two or three hundred thousand [were] wounded. If you ask people, they don’t even remember Korea; but it was very important at the time. Vietnam? I’ve always been a little ambivalent about. We sort of got in there by influence. We started off small; then a few more, and a few more, and then we couldn’t hardly [find] a way to get out. But I think we are now sort of adjusted to that. We’re honoring the Vietnam Veterans, which we should have done a long time ago. I question if we should have been there; but I don’t question the bravery of the young men and women who served there.
I thought it [the
construction of the Vietnam Memorial] was great. I don’t think we thought about a memorial for World 
War II. In fact, most people probably thought there
was one. Somebody started stirring
around in Congress about ten or twelve years ago. There are a lot of state memorials, but no national memorial to
World War II. Here we are, thirteen
years later, finally getting it underway.
We’ve gone from 16.5 million World War II vets down to about five million.
We’ve become the disappearing generation. It will be about two and half years before [the memorial] is completed.
That will mean another million gone, or more.
I think it’s important for future generations to recognize sacrifice.
Sometimes it’s necessary. Sometimes
you’re called upon to serve your country, and that’s what it’s really all
about. It’s not that anybody in World War II feels
like they need some memorial. We think
future generations may need to be reminded.
My hero is Dwight D. Eisenhower. I mean Eisenhower, of course, was familiar to all of us in World War II. He became President, and a lot of us looked up to Eisenhower. Of course, he was a Kansan, so we looked up to him [even] more. I think Senator Carlson, the late Senator Carlson, was sort of a role model too in a way. He had a lot of friends in both parties, in the Congress; and he got a lot of things done that way. I would guess the person I sort of admired the most during that time [though] was President Eisenhower.
As the leader [of your party], you don’t get much time at home. During the last eight or ten years--having a leadership position in the Senate--you had to go out and help your colleagues and travel everywhere else. You don’t get home as much; and I think that’s something that I would change. You want to go home; and you want to go back to the people who sent you there. They’ll level with you, and tell you what you may not like to hear sometimes. Plus, you need to keep your feet on the ground and that’s a good place to do that. [It’s good] to go back to your home state, and not get any big ideas that you’re a special person.
The thing I learned in dealing with people, in both parties [and] in dealing with constituents, is you have to keep your word. Your word in politics is important. It’s important in everything; but in politics--cause people are fairly cynical about politicians anyway--if they ever catch you telling them one thing and doing another, or your colleagues in the Congress--if you give your word and then change your mind without some very, good reason--it hurts your creditability as a leader. Learn to listen, keep your word, and follow through. The thing that use to frustrate me was someone would write, from Southeast Kansas or wherever, a letter. Of course it’s impossible to read every letter, and it would be passed off to somebody; and I’d go back to that town and some guy would say, “I wrote you a letter and I never got an answer.” That really hurts when somebody drops the ball in your office. We had a good staff, did a lot of good work; but there are always a few things that fall through the cracks, and there’s always a few things you regret later because somebody didn’t get a response.
[Now] I’m not sure where I’ll live. I want to keep my residence in Kansas. She’ll [Mrs. Dole] be resident in North Carolina, and we’ll live part of the time in Washington. It’s pretty complicated. I have a home in Russell, and haven’t been out there recently; but I hope to get out there pretty soon. I’ve had some medical problems this summer. I was in Lawrence about a month ago for the groundbreaking of the Dole Institute of Politics. My wife is sort of complicating things. I’ve been down there [North Carolina] a couple of times. Next year I assume I’ll be--because I’ve had a lot of experience in agriculture, with veterans, and health care--I think I might be helpful. Again, it’s her campaign and I’ll do whatever I’m asked to do if I can do it; but right now, she’s doing very well. She had the public service bug, and I think its more public service than political in that area of her life. You don’t make a lot of money, but you can make a difference in people’s lives and you don’t have to do it forever. You can do it for ten or fifteen years then do something else. [For] a lot of people, like myself, once you get into it you do sort of get the bug and you hate to leave. [But] there [does] come a time where you need to leave and you have to decide when that is. There are a couple of people in Congress who probably should leave, but they won’t leave.
[Now] I do some speaking, and I’ve been doing some commercials, and some of the talk shows around. I don’t do a lot of press. I avoid a lot of press. During the Clinton administration, I was Chairman of International Commission on Missing Persons. [Our agency] made about a dozen trips to Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo trying to identify the remains of about 20,000 to 30,000 people that had disappeared over there. So, I’ve kept pretty busy in a number of ways. Now I have to do a little campaigning in North Carolina.
This oral history was researched and prepared by Angela Meyer. Spring 2002
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