Dole’s Hometown Folks Turn Out to Rally for ‘Their Boy’ : Campaign: Russell residents, who helped the Kansas Republican in his darkest hours after WWII, present him with a new cigar box of contributions.

In a dramatic conclusion to his presidential announcement tour, Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole returned to his wind-swept Kansas hometown Friday for an enthusiastic rally that recalled his darkest hours and anticipated much brighter days ahead.

Under cloudy skies, in a stiff wind that flapped the flags so loudly they sometimes drowned out the speakers on the podium, the local Veterans of Foreign Wars chapter presented Dole with a monument commemorating the wounds he suffered in Italy in the waning months of World War II--50 years earlier to the day.

Remembering the cigar box that residents put out to raise funds for Dole’s hospital bills during his long months of recovery after the war, the town also presented him with a new wooden cigar box--filled with more than $7,000 in contributions for his presidential campaign.

That gesture caught the spirit of the day. For the thousands of friends and supporters who gathered at a VFW post here, and for Dole himself, the morning felt less like a memorial than a celebration. The past was heavy in the air. But almost everyone in Russell appeared to have their eyes on the future. Public opinion polls show Dole leading his competitors for the 1996 GOP nomination--and besting President Clinton in tests of strength for the general election.

“Nobody knows what will happen in the next 12 months,” Dole told the crowd. “But . . . it feels different this time around. . . . It just seems to me that it’s out there.”

Dole’s appearance in Russell capped a week that gave him every cause for optimism. There may be many turns ahead in his quest for the prize that eluded him in 1980 and 1988 bids for the nomination, but his campaign aides were glowing this week about the strong start of his third drive for the presidency.

Since announcing his candidacy last Monday, he raised $3 million and formed impressive committees of supporters in North Carolina and Florida. He also moved forcefully to preempt doubts about his candidacy on the right by endorsing voluntary school prayer and promising not to raise income taxes if elected--a pledge that he refused to sign in 1988 at great cost to his campaign.

At Friday’s ceremonies in Russell, Dole’s relatives, friends, high school classmates and longtime political supporters all bubbled over with enthusiasm and anticipation. The local newspaper printed a four-section special edition celebrating his life. Supporters sold buttons declaring Russell the “home of Bob Dole,” and at the rally, classmates from Russell High held up placards reading simply, “Class of ’41.”

It seemed that virtually all 4,781 souls in Russell, not to mention many from neighboring communities, crowded into the VFW hall for a pancake breakfast and then filed out behind the building to watch the unveiling of the monument to Dole: a bronze plaque embedded in a nine-foot-high, two-ton sheet of milky-colored greenhorn limestone quarried just north of town. The street that ran behind the VFW hall was renamed Bob Dole Drive.

Dole himself spent much of his time on the platform calling out to friends in the audience and reminiscing about experiences growing up. After his remarks, he spent over an hour shaking hands and signing autographs on everything from posters to greeting cards to a woman’s T-shirt.

“Everywhere I look around I see something that reminds me of one little chapter, one little phase of my life,” Dole said.

The most powerful memories stemmed from Dole’s experiences in World War II. Like much else over the past week, Dole’s appearance Friday highlighted his identity as the last plausible presidential candidate from the “GI Generation” that survived the Depression, defeated the Nazis, and then provided America with most of its postwar presidents.

Friday’s ceremonies underscored the chasm in age and experiences between the 71-year-old Dole and 48-year-old Bill Clinton, the first baby boomer President. Dole was torn open by German fire in Italy just two days after Franklin D. Roosevelt died, and more than a year before Bill Clinton was born.

Events conspired to frame the contrast even more sharply. While Dole was celebrating the memory of those who fought in World War II--a conflict that offered moral clarity so stark it has been termed “The Good War”--the President was arguing in Washington that the penitent memoirs of former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara validated the views of those, like Clinton, who opposed the bitterly divisive war in Vietnam.

Many political analysts believe that in stressing his experiences in World War II, Dole may be not only drawing a contrast with competitors who did not serve in the military, a group that includes leading Republican rivals such as Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas, but also tapping favorable images of a generation often portrayed in popular culture as more stable and steady than the mercurial baby boom.

In so doing, Dole’s campaign is attempting to convert what might be a liability--his age--into an asset.

“It’s the first time we’ve had generational politics from the older generation,” says Democratic pollster Mark Mellman.

Indeed, after downplaying discussion of his war record through most of his political career, Dole all week wrapped himself in that memory. On Thursday, he appeared at a local monument to Vietnam veterans in Columbia, S.C., and was introduced by Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) as “someone who embodies all the best qualities of the American soldier.”

At virtually every stop during his five-day inaugural campaign swing, Dole portrayed his decision to run as flowing from the emotions he experienced while attending the ceremonies commemorating the 50th anniversary of D-day last year--and his memories of how his neighbors in Russell helped him rebuild his life after his battlefield wounds brought him near death.

“I’m not perfect,” Dole said at a North Carolina rally Thursday, “but . . . I have been tested and tested and tested in many, many ways in my lifetime.”

On Friday there were many in the crowd who remembered when Dole, who left for the war as a 190-pound star athlete, returned to his house on 1035 Maple Drive on a stretcher, weighing less than 125 pounds and unable to use his right arm.

“It was tough,” recalled his sister Norma Jean Steele. “When they first brought him home it was pitiful. . . . (But) the town just poured out. They brought food, they were there for visits, they brought us flowers. He was their boy, and he still is.”

Henry Bender from Russell was in the crowd holding up a “Class of ‘41” placard. He also remembers when his friend arrived home, so thin and hobbled that his life already appeared behind him. Now Bender shakes his head at the sight of that shattered young man standing before him almost half a century later as the clear front-runner for his party’s presidential nomination.

“It hardly seems believable,” Bender says.