Dole: Carved From Kansas Bedrock

The Aladdin Temple is a great barn of a building with a recessed center ring big enough to accommodate precision motorcycle teams and those little race cars that Shriners drive in parades, but on this evening, half the floor and most of the raised areas surrounding it are occupied by Republican stalwarts assembled to honor their governor, George Voinovich, and their candidate for president, Bob Dole of Kansas.

A cloud of red, white and blue balloons hangs in a net above the stage and a local rock band is lashing the crowd as Dole strides to the microphone. In keeping with the GOP’s emphasis on traditional values, a phalanx of young people forms a backdrop across the stage; they are Republican kids, but their haircuts and clothes still reflect an era notably different from the candidate’s.

The audience responds enthusiastically to the policy planks of Dole’s standard speech: the pledges to appoint conservative judges and make English the official language, and the hymn to states’ rights. Plus a cautious endorsement of school prayer:

“I also believe that young people can get together and engage in football, basketball, all these things they do in high school and the lower grades, and it wouldn’t be too bad, as long as it wasn’t dictated by the teachers or by the state, if they could get together and have a word of voluntary prayer.”

He swings into the peroration, riffing more as he builds.

“Politicians blow in, blow out, blow off--in Florida the other night we thought we were going to blow up; we had rain coming in on the electrical wires--in any event . . . a lot of people think all of us were born in blue suits and neckties and Bob Dole was born majority leader of the Senate. That’s not the case at all, but we’ve lost touch with America. . . . “

“Well, I’ll tell you who I am. I’m very proud to be from Russell, Kan., population 5,500. And when I was born--in the Army, when we didn’t like somebody, we’d say that man was ‘issued’--well, I was born. I was born. And my dad wore his overalls to work every day for 42 years and was proud of it. And my mother sold Singer sewing machines and vacuum cleaners to try to make ends meet. Six of us grew up living in a basement apartment. That was Bob Dole’s early life. And I’m proud of it because we learned a lot about values--about honesty and decency and responsibility and integrity and self-reliance, and loving your God and your family and your church and your community. And those are the values we ought to have. . . . “

Cautious of Emotion

His voice is unmistakable. The raspy penetration of a French horn. The deliberate skirting of emotion. The Robin Williams-like tendency to free-associate out loud, moving seamlessly from personal recollection to rim-shot humor to campaign jab and back to remembrance. The constant pull and tug between unquenchable ambition and an ingrained fear of claiming too much for himself too openly.

He tells the crowd about seeing New York for the first time after joining the Army, the boy from the Great Plains encountering Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. And going to the top of the Empire State Building in Manhattan. “It was the greatest thing that had ever happened in my life.”

Quick as heat-lightning he adds the zinger: “Highest I’d ever been.” The audience does a double-take, hesitates uncertainly, then bursts into laughter. He toys with the joke, then turns serious again.

“On the 14th of April, 1945, a long time ago, I was in the wrong place at the right time and ended up being wounded and in and out of hospitals for the next 39 months. . . .

“And the long and the short of it is this: In America, if you want to reach for the stars, you reach for the stars. If you want to keep fighting and keep trying, if you get a break here and there, there’s no telling how high you might go, in America. . . .”

“It’s up to you. It’s up to you. . . . I concluded a long, long time ago that this is not a white America or black America or Hispanic America. We’re not young, we’re not old, we’re not rich, we’re not poor, we’re not disabled, we’re not something else.

“This is America. We’re one America, the greatest nation on the face of the Earth.”

*

A life, if it endures, is like a tree. Decade after decade, it has a wondrous elasticity. It may bend alarmingly under ice and snow, then straighten with the thaw. Or huddle in a crowd for years, then spread forth if space and opportunity increase.

There comes a point, however, when time and nature and events have done their work. The heart wood has dried. The tree has become what it is going to be.

So it is now with Robert Joseph Dole. Last year, as the presidential fire built within him once more, he told the Republican National Committee, “I’m willing to be another Ronald Reagan. If you want me to, I’ll be another Reagan.”

It was a promise he could not have kept; the time is long past when Dole could transform himself to suit a new political season. Today, there is only one person Bob Dole can be: himself.

Who, exactly, have time and nature and events produced? What might the sum of all his parts turn out to mean if he is elected president? His words offer clues--what he can say and what he cannot--but the full-text answers can be seen in the landscape of his life.

Few men ever absorbed the style and values of the culture into which they were born so completely. It would be hard to find a more nearly perfect embodiment of the small-town, rural Midwest of the 1930s and 1940s. When he describes his present quest for the presidency as one last mission “for my generation,” he is not just calling up images from the past. As though sprung from a time capsule, he is the particular slice of long-ago America from whence he came.

Striving Family

His roots are American Gothic. Grant Wood, not Norman Rockwell. The Russell, Kan., of Dole’s youth was dry as dust, tough as sod, close as a vest, unbending as a cottonwood.

And the dominant attitudes of that time and place were driven into the core of his being with almost religious intensity by a family in which ceaseless striving was the first commandment and perfection the only passing grade.

Perhaps only Bob Dole fully understands what an ambiguous heritage that is:

The astonishing capacity for sheer hard work; the ambition that never slumbers. The ad-lib wit that warms his conversation; the biting tongue that can turn ferocious and self-destructive before he knows it. The moving way of talking about his parents, the war, the struggle to recover from his wounds; the seemingly insurmountable difficulty with “the vision thing.”

Only political hunger drove Dole to offer to become Reagan. He never even remotely resembled the man who shed a small-town Illinois childhood like a chrysalis. But the comparison offers insight:

Reagan was Norman Rockwell. Cheerful, folksy, sentimental. A magician with symbols. Like Rockwell, he used Main Street--or rather his own romanticized vision of it--to conjure up pictures of a noble, innocent America that millions of people responded to.

Reagan Contrast

He had, after all, made his way in life as an actor. Not “Reagan was just an actor” in the derisive way liberals used to say it, but “Reagan was an actor” in the sense that he had mastered the craft of creating roles and images that an audience--the whole country, sometimes--would accept and even enter into.

Reagan, for example, was not in combat in World War II, but when he spoke of that war, people heard the music beneath the words and millions not only understood but were themselves momentarily transported back in time.

Dole, by contrast, must contend with the fact that he is merely real.

He was the kind of soldier in World War II that Hollywood only talked about. An All-American boy who won serious medals the hard way: wounded not once but twice, the second time blown nearly to pieces trying to rescue a mortally wounded comrade. And his three-year-plus struggle against devastating physical injuries, potentially lethal infections and despair reflects a will to prevail that may surpass the spontaneous heroism of the battlefield.

Moreover, he lived the small-town, Main Street life that Ronald Reagan and Norman Rockwell and others built myths around. His career, however, has demonstrated again and again that this heritage is not an unmixed blessing--any more than the rural Midwest of a half century ago was a place of unmixed virtues.

Dole has overcome great obstacles and risen to a position of power, and almost everyone who knows him well regards him as a generous-spirited man at heart. Yet his political life is marked by repeated setbacks, by self-inflicted wounds and by a recurrent tendency to bite and gouge in the clinches.

Along with the heartland strengths and values he extols came fears he would never put to rest, wounds that would never entirely heal.

And because he is the real thing, after 72 years he has little capacity to change, to grow new branches or prune away qualities that cause him problems.

Oh yes, during this winter’s GOP primaries he could scurry further to the right to ward off rivals, but that was ground he had trod before. He survived the only serious challenge to his Senate seat--the post-Watergate, anti-Republican tide of 1974--by bludgeoning his Democratic opponent with abortion. What he cannot do is become something inconsistent with his particularly inflexible heritage. If a broad spectrum of the American electorate is to embrace Dole’s leadership, it appears voters will have to warm to him; unlike many politicians--unlike, in particular, the president he now challenges--Dole finds it hard even to pretend to bend very far toward them.

Nor can Dole spin out the visions for America’s future that come so easily from President Clinton and many others. Clinton delivers sermons as naturally as he eats French fries. Not Dole. He can flay the skin off an opponent. He can sing “America the Beautiful.” Even cry in public. But he cannot do “vision.”

Cannot because, deep down, he does not want to. He does not want to talk that way because to do so would be to become a kind of man he would never want to be: the kind of man his father and his Kansas neighbors did not respect.

‘Going to Serve’

You could see how the branch was bent during Dole’s first campaign for public office: the Kansas Legislature in 1950, which he won while just getting back on his feet. His opponent was an legislator named Elmo J. Mahoney, an aging Populist. In a telling comment years later, Dole dismissed Mahoney with these words: “Name a problem, he had a solution--a verbal one anyway.”

After beating Mahoney, Dole was asked what his own legislative agenda would be. “I’m going to sit and watch for a couple of days,” he later remembered, “and then I’ll stand up for what I think is right.”

The answer almost perfectly foreshadowed the answer Dole gave to biographer Richard Ben Cramer in 1995, when Cramer asked what he would do on his first day as president: “If I get elected, at my age, you know . . . I’m not going anywhere,” he said. “It’s not an agenda. I’m just going to serve my country.”

“Bob Dole is not a visionary,” Sen. William S. Cohen (R-Me.), a friend and supporter, conceded at the beginning of the year. “He is not like Newt [Gingrich] or Clinton, who can give a long dissertation on the 21st century. Perhaps that is why he doesn’t talk about an agenda. Dole’s agenda is that ‘I share values with a lot of people in this country.’ ”

For Dole, talking too much, too grandly, especially suggesting he had all the answers, was to invite ridicule in the eyes of men and women who had been taught the limits of human resourcefulness every day of their lives by dust storms, depressions, sickness and sheer bad luck.

“It’s not seemly,” says Carolyn Adger, a linguist who has examined regional speech patterns. Among Midwesterners of Dole’s background and generation, hyperbole, flowery promises and the rest, is “just not the way you talk. Showing competence, self-reliance, he does it by speaking in that spare way.”

There is another alloyed blessing in Dole’s heritage.

When Dole declares that we are not “white America or black America or Hispanic America. We’re not young, we’re not old, we’re not rich, we’re not poor. . . . We’re one America,” he is unfurling the banner of the melting pot and “Brotherhood Week.” He is summoning up the vision of the United States as it wanted to be in 1940 or 1950.

In 1996, many still cherish those ideals but the United States is far more fractionated than it was in 1945, far more conflicted on the question of how far society should go toward accommodating diversity.

But resolving disagreements of that kind is particularly hard for Dole. Because he approaches voters with so little of the actor’s art, he has difficulty persuading them to put aside their own inclinations and join him in seeing the world his way.

Though he talks incessantly about Russell and his wartime experiences, Dole has not found it easy to establish bonds with listeners--stirring their hearts, drawing them vicariously into experiences they did not share.

Dole’s small-town roots do touch a powerful part of American mythology. Norman Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post covers sold in Cleveland and Keokuk alike. And Harry Truman turned his Missouri plain speaking into an irresistible political force, at least for a while.

Dole has turned to Russell as a talisman many times--as President Ford’s running mate in 1976 and in his own presidential bids in 1980 and 1988, among others. Each time, other images have stolen the spotlight, often negative images of Dole’s own creation.

The question is whether this time Dole can make the myth work for him.

*

He was born on July 22, 1923, in a town where geography was destiny. Geography, and the Union Pacific railroad.

The railroad created Russell. It brought settlers, sold them land, linked them to the larger world, encouraged their dreams. In 1871, the year after the tracks arrived, the village of Fossil Station changed its name to Russell and began to talk of replacing Kansas City as the commercial hub of the Great Plains.

Geography would take care of such fantasies. Russell County lies at the edge of the huge climatic shadow cast by the Rocky Mountains. Farther east, plentiful rain creates some of the most productive farmland in the world. Within the shadow, rainfall is so undependable that early map makers called it the Great American Desert.

The soil around Russell was good; some even had oil beneath it. Rainfall was another matter. In good years, there was enough for winter wheat, milo and alfalfa. In bad years, nothing grew and the land itself blew through the air in gritty torrents.

The promise of cheap land attracted Dole’s grandparents: Robert and Margaret Dole from upstate New York and Joseph and Elva Talbott, his mother’s parents, from Rising Sun, Ind.

Confluence of Cultures

The same sense of renewable possibilities attracted the “Volga Germans,” farmers whose ancestors had been lured from Germany to the steppes of Russia by promises of land from Catherine the Great and who themselves responded to an offer of cheap land in the United States, along the Smokey Hill river just south of Russell. They brought with them hard winter wheat called Turkey Red and the skill to wrest harvests from a harsh climate.

The Volga Germans, like the Doles and the Talbotts, also brought with them a dogged faith in hard work and an emotional spareness that seemed to fit their new home. Thus the two population streams that shaped Russell, the native-born and the immigrant, came together to form a society that was exceptionally unified and uncompromising in what it valued and in what it expected from its progeny. Like the winter wheat, the children were expected to endure and to thrive without coddling.

As the senator put it in a 1988 memoir he and his wife Elizabeth wrote with Richard Norton Smith: “Doles and Talbotts shared a common ethic in which work was instinct, idleness a sin. Affection was more often implied than stated. Likewise with praise for work well done.”

Viewed from one angle, Dole’s childhood, like the town, appears suffused with heroic light, illuminated by the constant striving and unbreakable spirit of pioneers.

As a boy he was always working. He delivered handbills for the grocery store with his younger brother Kenny, had a paper route, dug dandelions from neighbors’ yards for a nickel a bushel, packed down.

Later, from the time he was about 12, Dole worked at Dawson’s drugstore on Main Street, clerking, making ice cream sodas and phosphates, learning to contribute to the banter and wisecracks that were a tradition at Dawson’s. It was there he formed his youthful plan to become a doctor.

He was handsome, well-mannered, always immaculate. He remembers that he and Kenny had only one set of school clothes each; his mother washed and ironed them fresh every night, as she did his father’s overalls and his two sisters’ dresses.

Dole made his own barbells with cement blocks and iron bars to build his strength as an athlete. He ran everywhere to build his endurance. He lettered in football, basketball and track.

He also won membership in the National Honor Society and by his senior year was head and shoulders the most popular and promising boy in town.

His senior year, he got a letter from Phog Allen, the legendary University of Kansas basketball coach, inviting him to visit Lawrence. With the help of a banker in Russell and some money the family had put aside, Dole would get to go to college. The world would open before him.

That was the bright side.

Another Viewpoint

Viewed from another angle, the sky over Russell in the 1920s and ‘30s was streaked with darkness and hovering danger, possessed of an uncaring glint that could haunt the dreams of a lifetime.

In Dust Bowl and Depression, some families made it through but others lost everything and never recovered. One of those was his grandfather Robert Dole, who lost his land, worked for years as a tenant farmer and ended up on welfare; Dole often tells the story of signing those checks himself as county attorney in the 1950s.

The dust storms could bring more than economic ruin to farmers out on the Plains; they could bring death right into town. When Dole was a young boy, a man named Jack Phipps died of “dust pneumonia” even though Dole’s father and other men took turns showering his house with water for days in a vain effort to cleanse the air.

When Dole was 9, Kenny developed a terrible infection in one leg. Medical care was so primitive that doctors sowed the wound with maggots, hoping they would eat away the diseased tissue. Day after day, Kenny lay tied to the bed while the grisly, futile process went on. Finally, the boy was taken to the hospital in Hays, 30 miles away; he survived but spent most of four years on crutches.

Close to Poverty

And while Dole’s own family never knew real poverty--his father always had a job; his mother added to their income by driving all over the county selling Singer sewing machines and vacuum cleaners--they were never more than a twist of bad luck away from disaster. A boy as bright as Dole could not have failed to notice nor realize what course he himself had better follow.

For a time, after the discovery of oil touched off a boom in Russell, the whole family--the two parents, Bob, Kenny, their older sister Gloria and their younger sister Norma Jean--lived jammed together in the basement of their house while the upstairs was rented out to oil people.

Dole’s parents were sunshine and shadow like the rest of his world.

Doran Dole

Dole’s father, Doran, was a piece of the bedrock.

He returned from the Army after World War I, married Bina Talbott and opened a tiny restaurant called the White Front Cafe. By the time Dole was born, the cafe had failed and Doran had turned to safer work, with less chance to rise but less chance of falling into the abyss. For some years he managed the milk-and-egg station, buying eggs, milk and sour cream from local farmers and shipping them out to market. Later, he did much the same thing managing the Russell elevator for the Norris Grain Co. of Salina.

In both jobs, he was as comfortable as overalls. A strong, stocky, dependable man, he had a sly wit that could slip past you if you weren’t listening. He missed all of one day’s work in 40 years. He served more than half a century as a volunteer fireman. He was the kind who would sit up all night with a sick friend or work from daylight to dark, come home, wash up and drive 30 miles to Hays every night to be with Kenny in the hospital.

The kind of man entrusted with delivering the telegrams from the War Department during World War II.

He was also the kind of man from whom “pretty good” was as warm as praise got. “There are doers and stewers,” he used to say. He left the weekly whippings to his wife, and he would slip out of the house with a little smile when Bina’s temper ran too high. But there was no doubt about what he expected from his sons.

Bina Dole

If Doran was a rock, Bina was a tornado.

From the descriptions that have been handed down, it’s hard to see how she got it all done. She made most of the family’s clothes. She made curtains and kept them starchy clean. The floors were always polished, sometimes while the kids sat at the dining room table knowing better than to let their feet touch the wood until it dried. Bina (it rhymed with ‘Carolina’) even insisted the inside of the garbage can be polished and she waxed the front porch.

That was on top of running up curtains or dresses for potential customers to demonstrate the value of owning a sewing machine. On top of collecting money for the needy, on top of church and community work, on top of inviting lonely servicemen from a nearby air base for a weekend of home cooking.

Everybody helped, of course. Nothing less than a perfect job, of course. No excuses, of course. “ ‘Can’t’ never could do anything” was her credo. Later, she would say Dole turned out even more particular than she was, especially about his appearance. Once, the story goes, when she demanded to know why he was wearing a sweater on a sweltering day, he reluctantly explained he’d wrinkled his shirt and didn’t want it to show.

Like Doran, she was not over-generous with praise. Dole himself remembers her reaction when he delivered his acceptance speech to the 1976 Republican National Convention as Ford’s running mate. It was his first bid for national office. When he finished and came off the podium, he asked his mother how he’d done.

“You usually do better,” she said.

Hard work and talent gained him much as a boy, but it would have been difficult to grow up in that household and that town in the 1920s and ‘30s without concluding that the world could be a cold and dangerous place. What happened in the years immediately after he finished high school drove the point home with cruel force.

*

Momentarily, when he graduated in June 1941, the life of his dreams seemed to lie before him like a prize already won. Kids like Dole rarely went to college at all. He was going to KU, the state’s elite school, almost the Ivy League when you squinted at it from a place like Russell.

And the year and a little more that Dole spent there stand out as a unique moment in the stream of his life. He went out for the freshman basketball team. He joined Kappa Sigma fraternity. He enrolled in premed courses. He went to parties. It was as though, for one halcyon moment, he thought he had made good his escape, had made it to the higher ground he had been running toward almost since he could walk.

Events soon cured him of that notion.

By the fall of 1942, his sophomore year, he had become such a care-free student that his grades were no better than gentlemanly Cs. The United States was at war in the Pacific, Europe and Africa. Many young men his age had long since been drafted or enlisted; attending farewell parties had become a prominent feature of campus life.

Dole was not one of those who rushed to the colors. But in December 1942, a year after Pearl Harbor and 25 years after his father joined the Army, the 19-year-old entered the Army’s Enlisted Reserve Corps. Today, he jokes that it was the dean at KU who suggested he consider the military, saying: “You might as well. You’re not doing anything here.”

For something over a year, his military career resembled Lawrence in a different form: an exciting introduction to exotic new worlds. He was shunted through a succession of training schools: Camp Barkley in Texas for medical corps training, to Brooklyn College for an engineering course, to Camp Polk, La., and antitank gunnery school at Camp Breckenridge, Ky.

But by the spring of 1944, as Dole explained to his audience at the Shrine temple in Columbus, casualty rates were running so high that he was hustled through Officer Candidate School, turned into a second lieutenant and shipped to Italy.

“The soft underbelly of Europe” had turned out to be a killing ground. Dole was sent to a replacement depot, then forwarded to the 85th Regiment of the 10th Mountain Division. I Company in the Third Battalion needed a 90-day wonder. It was February 1945, and the end of the war seemed near, but German troops had dug into the Apennine Mountains and stubbornly barred the way. It was cold, monotonous, deadly warfare.

Dole got an initial taste of combat when his platoon was assigned to make a night assault. He threw a hand grenade and was slightly wounded by shrapnel when it bounced off a tree and exploded too close to him. At that stage of the war, he said later, it was the sort of wound the Army treated with Mercurochrome and a Purple Heart.

Hill 913

In mid-April, his unit was part of a huge attack designed to leapfrog the mountainous spine of central Italy, capture the ancient city of Bologna and open the Po Valley. On the morning of April 15, I Company’s objective was to clear a network of German bunkers and machine gun emplacements on an anonymous ridge called Hill 913.

The American force swept down the slope of a facing ridge and across a shallow valley, already bright green. A stone wall and hedgerows ran along the valley floor, and up the gradual slope beyond a clearing, the Germans waited.

Dole’s platoon--three rifle squads and a machine gun team--was pinned down almost immediately. Dole led a small group against German machine guns in a farmhouse off to the left and again came under fire. He dived into a bomb crater, but when his radio man went down, Dole crawled out to get him. He got the soldier’s lifeless form back to the crater and moved forward again.

Almost instantly he was hit from behind by the tearing explosion of an artillery shell or a mortar. Shell fragments smashed his right shoulder, broke his collarbone, punctured one lung and shotgunned his spine, leaving him paralyzed from the neck down.

Dole credits a soldier named Frank Carafa with crossing 40 yards of open ground to pull him to safety. Platoon Sgt. Stan Kuschik gave him a shot of morphine, marked his forehead with blood to warn medics that he had received the drug and ordered a soldier named Arthur McBryar to stay with the lieutenant until help came.

Hospital in Topeka

Dole said in his autobiography that he lost all sense of where he was, that his mind wandered back to Russell--to kids he had played with, his parents at dinner, to “Spitzy, a little white dog we had when I was a child.”

The battle raged over the two of them for hours, Dole pale and barely able to speak, McBryar applying sulfa powder and feeding him water to keep him going. Eventually, when the firing eased, McBryar went for help. He was knocked down and nearly out by the shock wave from an exploding shell, but he held on and led a rescue party back to where the lieutenant lay.

Dole was removed to an evacuation station and eventually shipped home. By the time he reached Winter General Army Hospital in Topeka, he was encased in plaster from chin to hips. He could not walk. He was expected never to walk again. Indeed, he could scarcely move--could not feed himself, could not hold the cigarettes he had begun to smoke, could not shake off a feverish infection that would soon lead to the removal of one kidney.

He was, at that moment, further down, further away from the life he’d dreamed of and labored for, than he had been in the darkest days of his childhood.

As children, men who fought in World War II as Dole did were of an age to know veterans of the Civil War. Some who survived the full horror of that first truly modern conflict came home and did nothing else for the rest of their lives; they were remembered as fixtures on town squares and park benches, sitting their days away. There were veterans of the world wars like that too. It was as though merely surviving such a monstrous thing had consumed all the energy within them.

Dole would not be one of those. He would do more than survive. He would walk again, finish college and graduate from law school at Washburn University in Topeka, learn to compensate for his almost-lifeless right arm and damaged left hand so artfully that after a time people hardly noticed. He would marry a therapist named Phyllis Holden, have a daughter, go to Congress and the Senate. Medical science would make contributions at critical points, including a then all-but-untested drug called streptomycin and a surgeon Dole still reveres named Hampar Kelikian.

In the end, however, nothing could restore what had been blown away; the only possibility was to learn to live without it, to learn to live in spite of it. And only one thing would make that possible: Dole’s own dark determination that his life would not end this way, that it would move forward, upward--as he and his parents had always intended that it should.

The years of effort it would take, however, and the price he would pay in pain and frustration, in fear, humiliation, depression and shame, in the loneliness of believing he had to do everything himself--had to overcome not only his own undeserved loss but the advantages life had dealt to others--those costs would exceed all measuring.

Thereafter, he would never stop running and he would never lower his guard.

Tomorrow: Dole embarks on a career in politics.