Dole was the last of the presidential candidates who served in World War II, and in the ’96 campaign he offered himself as a link to the so-called Greatest Generation and another, better time.
“To those who say it was never so that America was never better, I say you’re wrong, and I know because I was there, and I have seen it and remember it,” Dole said.
It didn’t work. Bill Clinton called Dole a man of the past and Democrats a bridge to the future, and easily won reelection.
It was true that Dole had come of age in an America that many voters had only heard about, but those days on the Kansas prairie — the Dust Bowl days, the Great Depression — and the war defined him.
Once a star high school athlete who had dreamed of becoming a doctor, he went off to a war that would change him forever. He came back badly wounded, and those wounds would cost him the use of one arm.
He worried that he would wind up in a wheelchair selling pencils on the street, and as he later told “60 Minutes” correspondent Lesley Stahl his life became a living nightmare.
“They got me out of bed one day, and the bathroom door was open,” said Dole. “There was a mirror on the far wall on the shaving cabinet. I couldn’t believe that was Bob Dole. So I didn’t look in the mirror. I still don’t look in the mirror, except to shave.”
Twice he nearly died, and he lost a kidney to infection, but the people of Russell, Kansas, collected money in a cigar box to help pay for his rehabilitation, and his war record led to a seat in Congress and later the Senate.
In 1976, Bob Dole was President Gerald Ford’s chosen vice-presidential running mate.