THE KANSAN:

Dwight Eisenhower was the old soldier's hero. But in politics, Dole looked to another impoverished small town kid who dreamed big, even as he was knocked down. With reverence, he called Richard Nixon "the old man" and fiercely defended him through his 1974 resignation. Dole wept as he closed his eulogy for him at his 1994 funeral.

Dole's sharp tongue, wily partisanship and often grim visage prompted many to write him off as an embittered politician. Cartoonists caricatured him as Darth Vader or the "Ayadollah." Comedians lampooned his gruff style and habit of speaking of himself in the third person.

Even some in his own party criticized him as a skilled but cynical practitioner of power politics, where idealism often took a back seat to practical objectives.

He made no apologies for searching out common ground.

"I learned something over at that place (the Senate) over the years," he said in May 1997. "I learned a lot about people. If you always dig deep enough, you can figure out almost everybody's vote, if you really think about it.

"Why would he do that?" Dole said he would ask himself again and again. "And then the light goes on."

He was always capable of surprising both friends and adversaries. In 1982, Dole crafted the compromise for a 25-year extension of the Voting Rights Act. A year later, he co-authored legislation designating Martin Luther King Jr's birthday as a national holiday. He supported affirmative action guidelines before backing away from them as a presidential candidate in 1996.

He developed a reputation as a deficit fighter with a deeply skeptical attitude toward supply-side economics. Yet he promoted a 15% income tax rate cut as the centerpiece of his unsuccessful White House bid and picked supply-side champion Jack Kemp as his vice presidential running mate.

Robert Joseph Dole was born July 22, 1923, the second of Doran and Bina Dole's four children. He grew up in a tiny white frame house with a family that melded the sentimentality of Norman Rockwell with the Midwestern stoicism of Grant Wood.

Doran Dole ran a cafe, an egg and cream station and the grain elevator in Russell, a windstrewn central Kansas town of 6,000 at its peak in the 1930s and '40s. Bina Dole talked, walked and worked fast. To bring in extra cash she sold Singer sewing machines from the back of the family car, driving the countryside demonstrating sewing techniques to women.

She was fastidious and charted the lives of her four children (Dole and siblings Gloria, Kenneth and Norma Jean) with days full of chores, schoolwork, errands, Sunday school. Her personal philosophy: "Can't never could do nothing."

The Doles survived blackout dust storms, the Great Depression and the rise and fall of farm prices, even moving into the basement of their home so the upstairs could be rented to oil field workers.

Dole delivered papers and mowed lawns. He said his first taste of politics came serving milkshakes and phosphates as a teenage soda jerk at Dawson's Drug Store on Russell's red-brick Main Street, where he learned to hold his own in a local tradition of friendly, barbed banter.

Decades before the fitness boom of the 1970s and 1980s, Dole and brother Kenny poured concrete into tin cans and fashioned weightlifting sets. He was a strapping 6-foot-1, 190-pounds in high school, where he ran the 440 and 880-yard dashes and became a basketball star.

Upon graduation, Dole decided to attend the University of Kansas in Lawrence, financed in part by borrowing $300 from a Russell businessman. Then World War II changed everything.

He was a sophomore when he enlisted in the Army and shipped off to Italy in late 1944. The new second lieutenant joined the famous 10th Mountain Division, famous for its skiing prowess. It began a long-running joke about the improbable placement of a prairie kid in such an outfit.

On April 14, 1945, less than a month before VE Day, his squad was trying to retake Hill 913 in central Italy. When he crawled to rescue a wounded soldier, Nazi fire ripped into his right shoulder, shredding bone and leaving him partially paralyzed in the mud. He went home in a body cast.

Dole earned two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star with two clusters for his gallantry. He also began a three-year ordeal to reclaim his health, losing 70 pounds and nearly dying twice from complications. His right arm remained paralyzed and mostly useless for the rest of his life.

He spent more than two years at Percy Jones Army Medical Center in Battle Creek, Michigan, where he regained the use of his legs and left arm. An occupational therapist he met there, Phyllis Holden, became his wife in June 1948.

Dole had to relearn how to eat, dress, use the toilet and write with a left hand that was often numb. For years after, to discourage people from grabbing for his right hand, he grasped a felt-tip pen. He said he would come to appreciate those who would reach out with their left hands for a shake.

Returning to Russell after the war, friends rallied to help. Chet Dawson from the old Main Street drugstore started a collection for Dole's hospital bills. He grabbed an empty cigar box, attached a "Dole Fund" label and placed it on the counter. The donations came in nickels, dimes and quarters. Banks pitched in.

The total reached $1,800, a big sum at the time. Dole kept the box in his office desk the rest of his life.

Through a family contact, he traveled to Chicago and met a respected surgeon, Hampar Kelikian.

The seven operations came in waves. Kelikian transplanted tendons from Dole's leg to his right shoulder. A chunk of scapula was removed, and muscles in Dole's neck were reconnected to his right arm. "Dr. K," who didn't charge for the surgeries, helped Dole understand something he'd been loath to accept: that he would be partially disabled the rest of his days.

"When you join that group, you say, `Why me?' But after you've been there awhile, you have to decide what you're going to do with your life," he told The Washington Post's Laura Blumenfeld in 1996.

Dole exercised tirelessly, using ropes, weights and pulleys in his backyard, to regain what limited arm strength he had. In a scheme to straighten his right elbow and pry open his clawed fingers, a high school football teammate molded a six-pound lead pipe affixed with rubber bands that he could walk with on his arm.

Dole had wanted to become a doctor, but that dream was gone, replaced by a nightmare he couldn't shake -- that he'd wind up an invalid selling pencils in little downtown Russell.

Without the use of his right hand, law school at Washburn University in Topeka was a challenge. He taped class lectures because he couldn't take notes quickly with his left hand. At night, he'd listen and painstakingly jot shorthand notes, learning to commit vast amounts of material to memory, a skill that he would draw on decades later in the Senate.

Both Republican and Democratic party leaders exhorted Dole to consider a political career. His father was a Democrat, but Dole knew the GOP enjoyed a two-to-one advantage in Kansas.

After a single term in the Kansas House, he stormed around Russell County trying to beat Dean Ostrum, another veteran, for the county attorney's seat.

"Dole just outworked him," a friend recalled years later.

One duty as county attorney he said he never forgot: signing welfare checks, including those for his grandparents. The experience made him sensitive to those in need. His personal responsibilities grew during this period as well. In 1954, his only child, daughter Robin, was born.

Late one night in 1960, after Dole's re-election to a fourth term, Huck Boyd, a Kansas newspaper publisher and Republican party activist, saw the lights on at the county courthouse. He was impressed to find Dole poring over index cards for political contacts.

Boyd appointed himself Dole's mentor and connected his protege to GOP power brokers. That year, Dole ran for Kansas' sprawling 1st District congressional seat.

Backed by the "Bobolinks," a team of women in matching skirts, sporting a slogan, "Roll with Dole," and with gallons of Dole pineapple juice, Dole waged a vigorous fight, beating Keith Sebelius by less than 1,000 votes in the GOP primary.

"I guess I was very competitive anyway and even after the disability I was more competitive," Dole said in 1994. "I was trying to prove myself that I could still make it, still do it."

The Nixon years

In Congress, Dole adhered to a staunchly conservative agenda and voting record. He opposed Medicare and most of President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society proposals with the exception of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, two landmark civil rights laws.

In 1964, though, his reelection was in danger. Kansas Republicans were deeply divided over the presidential candidacy of conservative Barry Goldwater, whom Dole backed.

Former Vice President Richard Nixon, collecting IOUs for a 1968 White House race, flew into Kansas and appeared for Dole at a rally. He was dazzled by Nixon, and grateful after his narrow victory (less than three percentage points). It began one of the most intriguing relationships in American politics.

In 1968, Dole ran for Senate, defeating former Gov. Bill Avery to replace the retiring Frank Carlson. He took his seat as Nixon won the presidency. From the floor of the Senate, Dole soon became his fiercest defender. His savage tone earned him the moniker that would stick for the rest of his political life.

"He's a hatchet man," said GOP colleague, Sen. William Saxbe of Ohio in 1971. "He couldn't sell beer on a troop ship."

His loyalty impressed the most important Republican, though. In 1970, Nixon awarded Dole chairmanship of the Republican National Committee. He threw himself into the job.

In his book about the 1988 elections, "What It Takes," Richard Ben Cramer described his efforts, traveling a half-million miles in two years as party chief:

"From the chairman's pulpit, Dole meant to open the Party to groups long ignored: farmers, blue-collar ethnics ... Blacks, Mexicans, Asians ... he never lost a chance to remind a crowd that his, theirs, was the Party of Lincoln, liberty, emancipation.

"He never lost a chance at a crowd. Dole was determined to show his critics -- show everyone -- that he could carry his Senate load (he still never missed a roll call) and show up in every corner of the country. ... Now, for the first time, a car came to fetch him, idling at the base of the Capitol steps as the Senate finished business for the afternoon. ... A jet was waiting at the airport. ... Advance men were waiting at another airport one or two thousand miles to the west. If Dole could pick up a time zone or two on his way to the diner, the funder, the rally ... he might have time for a press conference, too -- or a stop, somewhere, refueling ... 'Agh, better make it Kansas.'"

Dole never forsook Kansas, which fared well when appropriations or farm bills or tax bills popped out of Congress. He did, however, neglect his family. One year, his wife remembered sitting down to dinner with him only three or so times. In late 1971, Dole shocked her by saying simply: "I want out."

He was granted an emergency divorce in Kansas, leaving a dazed wife to mull what happened. (Phyllis Holden Macey, who later married her high school sweetheart, died in 2008.)

Watergate, the 1972 break-in that grew into a nation-gripping scandal, missed ensnaring Dole.

"It happened on my night off," he quipped about the ham-handed attempt to bug the Democratic Party headquarters, by happenstance located in the same complex along the Potomac River where he lived.

Despite Dole's dedication to Nixon and the RNC job, he was pushed out shortly after the 1972 election. Dole believed that Nixon still liked him, and that he was done in by treacherous West Wing aides. But White House documents released in 1996 by the National Archives and reported by The Washington Post show Nixon ordered his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, to "have some others put the heat on" Dole and make him step down.

While Nixon won reelection by a landslide that November, the GOP remained in the minority in both houses of Congress. Nixon wanted a full time organizer to take charge of the party. Dole was replaced by George H.W. Bush.

Still, as Watergate developed into a Nixon White House coverup, Dole's loyalty didn't wane, even to the final weeks of Nixon's presidency. That allegiance came back to haunt him in his Senate re-election bid of 1974.

As Nixon's presidency collapsed in the summer of 1974, Dole career was at risk. His fierce defense of the president, and his RNC chairmanship at the time of the Watergate break-in, linked him inextricably to an administration engulfed by scandal and criminality. Polls showed Democrat Bill Roy, a well-liked two-term House member from Topeka, led Dole by double digits late in the campaign.

In a last-ditch effort, Dole ran a TV spot that became known as "the mudsplat ad." It featured Dole's face on a campaign poster and an announcer ticking off Roy's attacks. With each, a gob of mud whacked the poster until Dole's face disappeared.

It galvanized the campaign and scandalized Kansans. Late in the race, Dole stunned them again during a debate at the State Fair in Hutchinson by calling Roy an abortionist. Roy, an obstetrician, had performed about a dozen legal abortions over a career of delivering 5,000 babies. Abortion opponents joined the battle and peppered the state with telephone calls and fliers denouncing Roy.

That fall, an exhausted Dole eked out a victory. It was his last close race.

Nixon would advise Dole years later, and the Kansan kept the letters in his Washington desk. In 1994, he would deliver an emotional address at Nixon's funeral, saying how his friend, as a young man from a poor family in a small town, heard the whistles of the night trains "and dreamed of all the distant places that lay at the end of the track."

He could have as easily been talking of himself.

In 1996, Dole finally won the GOP nomination, and he faced off against Clinton, who was seeking a second term. In resigning his Senate seat to make the presidential run, Dole gave the speech of his life--written by novelist Mark Helprin--on the Senate floor, saying, "I will then stand before you without office or authority, a private citizen, a Kansan, an American. Just a man."

The speech shocked the political establishment and got great reviews but did not change basic political dynamics. Dole seemed old and overmatched in the race, even though, at 72, he was young compared with today's politicians like Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Nancy Pelosi, or Mitch McConnell. Dole's odd habit of referring to himself in the third person emerged in his debate against Clinton, and it did not wear well: "Of the people listening tonight, the working families who will benefit from economic packages, they'll be better off when Bob Dole is president and Jack Kemp is vice president." And once again, Dole was unhappy with how his opponent portrayed him, complaining that Clinton "chose to engage in a campaign to scare American seniors. We call it Medicscare! Mediscare! Mediscare! All the ads you see in Florida, all the ads you see in Florida, are negative Mediscare ads!" It didn't help. Clinton won easily.

With his political career over, another side of Dole emerged. For too long, his image was that of the thin-skinned hatchet man, who spoke Senate-ese, a language only resembling English. The most famous instance of this was in 1988, when he incomprehensibly told a college student worried about acid rain, "That bill's in markup." Now people began to see what his Senate colleagues had long understood--that he was a funny guy and delightful company. David Letterman asked him about Clinton's weight. Dole's reply: "I never tried to lift him. I just tried to beat him."

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