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"FacebookPinterest\n\n It occurs to me,\u00A0sitting in a stately law office with Bob Dole, that Bob Dole is the exact opposite of so many of the politicians we talk about these days\u2014especially the animatronic, polished Mitt Romney, who tries so achingly hard to be real, to be authentic, to be someone like, well, Bob Dole.\u00A0\n\n Dole materialized last winter and entered the national conversation as one of the first Republicans anyone takes seriously to endorse Mitt Romney. (Wait, Bob Dole is still alive?)\u00A0In a letter to\u00A0The Des Moines Register, he offered an explicit and unanticipated reality check, becoming the lone conservative to actually\u00A0say something, politely, about the invasion of the GOP weirdos into the campaign.\n\n Bob Dole.\u00A0\n\n \"I'm still here!\" he says to me.\n\n Bob Dole?\n\n Aw, Bob Dole.\u00A0\n\n I ask him the question everyone seems to be asking of the GOP faithful in 2012: \"Would you say your endorsement of Romney was...tepid?\"\u00A0\n\n \"Not tepid at all,\" Bob Dole says, his face tight and serious.\n\n There's a spritely young flack sitting behind me and another one in a chair to my left, and so it is me and Bob Dole doing a show together, which apparently is what makes Bob Dole comfortable. \"Romney came to my office,\" Dole says, \"we had a good meeting, and I'm not a Gingrich fan, so...\" He famously loathed Gingrich: \"He's just difficult to work with. It's either Newt's way or the highway. He's got a lot of ideas. Some of them are good; not many. So it looked to me like it would be either Romney or Newt for the nomination, but just on its own, I thought he\u2014well, I'll say this: Romney\u00A0looks like a president.\"\u00A0\n\n It's always discomfiting to listen to people try to conjure\u00A0any serious oomph when\u00A0taking about Romney, and this moment is no exception. I make the point that Mitt Romney's\u00A0background is different from Bob Dole's. \"You're self-made,\" I say. \"You embody the American Dream.\"\u00A0\n\n \"I've never known a lot of rich people,\" he says. \"It's not my bag.\"\n\n His bag, even at 88, is to dress in a suit each day and show up at the law firm on F\u00A0Street in Washington, D.C., grand and formal where dressy people are busy and hushed. He seems propped behind his big walnut desk, his soft body slumped like an infant's in a high chair, his chin lowered over the knot of his polka-dot tie, trousers hiked high. He's wearing a crisp white shirt, and his thin hair is combed into obedient stripes. A fresh cotton ball taped over paper-thin skin on the back of his hand suggests hospital matters not quite resolved.\u00A0\n\n I ask him how he sizes up President Obama.\n\n \"He's a nice person. I have a good relationship with the White House, I just think he's totally out of step. We're moving farther to the left, and it may not be as bad as some people say, but we've got to cut spending. One of these days, we'll probably have to raise tas. I just think his philosophy is too far to the left.\"\n\n He blinks softly, not moving much else at all. His mind is clear. Sharp. But his body. It's as if his big blocky head were not attached to the dwindling rest of him. I ask about some of the central concerns of the campaign\u2014income inequality, negative ads, health care, gay marriage\u2014and while he appears engaged by the questions, he lacks the zeal to offer more than the \"one man, one woman,\" \"reduce spending\" party lines. His fuller thoughts lie elsewhere. He is an old man with old-man stuff going on in his head: back-in-the-day, and good golly, all those great guys and gals stomping through his time here on earth, so many more to hurry up and meet.\u00A0\n\n \"Bill Clinton called me one day recently,\" he offers. \"I said, 'What do you want?' He said, 'I want to see how you're doing. How's your health?' He's done that a couple times. If I did anything, I made a\u00A0lot of friends. And they were\u00A0Republicans, of course, and Democrats.\" Clinton would help Dole deal with Gingrich. \"I'm\u00A0not going to talk to him,\u00A0you talk to him,\" Dole, as Senate majority leader, would say to Clinton. \"No,\u00A0you talk to him.\"\n\n \"President Obama came to visit me in the hospital. He said, 'I wish you were still in the Senate; I need your help.' I'm not certain I can help on everything. Maybe some things.\"\n\n Bob Dole doesn't kid himself. He knows what he's good at (getting laughs, getting things done). He championed causes today's conservatives run full campaigns against\u2014civil rights, food stamps, benefits for the disabled. And Bob Dole knows what he's bad at (winning really big elections). He lost the vice presidency to Mondale in 1976 and then the presidency to Clinton in 1996. He even wears failure with a candor that seems lacking in Washington these days.\u00A0\n\n \"I don't know how many people run for vice president and president and lose both,\" Bob Dole says, turning to his aides. \"I think there's one other?\"\n\n \"You're testing my history on that one, sir. It would have been...\"\n\n Dole: \"Anybody?\"\n\n \"Lost both vice president and president? Um...\"\n\n Dole: \"Somebody said there was someone\u2014other than me?\"\n\n \"You have to go back pretty far, I just, I don't think\u2014\"\n\n Nobody can come up with one.\u00A0\n\n \u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n Said a fake\u00A0Bob Dole with a big yellow head on The Simpsons: \"Maybe Bob Dole should run. Bob Dole thinks Bob Dole should.\" Said a fake\u00A0snoozing Bob Dole in a short\u00A0red tie on\u00A0Family Guy: \"Bob\u00A0Dole is a friend of the tobacco\u00A0industry. Bob Dole likes your style. Bob Dole. Bob Dole. Bob Dole. Bob Dole.\"\u00A0\n\n You can't think \"Dole\" without thinking \"Bob Dole,\" and cartoons and third-person good times. He was one of\u00A0those politicians, the kind you jabbed but were happy enough to have around. His politics were plenty conservative\u2014and yet by today's standards seem almost quaint. Bob Dole. He's like the neighbors' Labrador retriever your dad used to curse for all that barking, all that darn digging in your mom's tulip bed, and now look, you live next door to a godforsaken pack of teeth-baring rabid Pomeranians, and, good golly, Bob Dole!\n\n When we met, he had his signature blue Flair pen in his right hand and an extra one anchored in his shirt pocket. He has always had the pen there, to keep his fingers from curling into a fist; as a side benefit, it reminds people not to reach out to shake his right hand, because he can't.\n\n \"Always have time for the daughter of a World War II serviceman,\" he said to me when we first met. It wasn't how I'd ever thought of defining myself, and I didn't remember mentioning any of that stuff to his people, so it caught me off guard.\u00A0\n\n \"Oh, the war,\" I said, awkwardly. \"Oh, my dad sure was proud of that...war.\"\u00A0\n\n \"Navy?\" Bob Dole said, and I nodded. \"And he's still...?\"\n\n \"He died last year.\"\n\n \"I see.\"\n\n It was a lot to cover in the first fourteen seconds of meeting anyone; Bob Dole goes right for the patriotism jugular. His service in World War II is almost certainly how he defines himself, even though he spent much of his public life hiding the wounds: right shoulder, arm, hand. He was never one to use the story to further his image, hardly even talked about the whole mess until\u00A0recently in a memoir.\u00A0\n\n He was an athlete. He was a poor kid from rural Kansas\u2014Depression, Dust Bowl, his parents moving the family to the basement to rent out the upstairs for money. He was a good kid, honors, played football, a basketball hero, gorgeous young man the girls adored, delivering the morning paper, working the soda fountain at Dawson's Drugstore. A local banker lent him $300 to go to college to become a doctor, and so he started, got a girl, but then America called just as manhood did, so he went into the army. Within twenty months, he was in a foxhole, ducking, spitting out dirt. \"Move out!\" came the command, and he snapped to, got on his feet, waved the platoon obediently out of the trench and forward into the wall of smoke in the middle of nowhere, Italy, in the Apennine mountains. Nazis were pouring artillery rounds from the pillbox bunkers on the hill above, the U.S. bombers blasting that hill to bits, napalm bombs, the mountains soon in flames. Guys tripping into wires, traps, land mines, explosions, then machine-gun fire, guys down everywhere, just lying there dead, everywhere, and then his buddy Sims, his radio guy, bam, Sims was down,\u00A0Sims! So he crawled in the dirt, having no idea Sims was already dead, slithered in the dirt to Sims and grabbed his shirt and pulled, pulled, and then\u00A0bam! He felt it in his back, fire in his back, and he lay in the dirt gurgling words, his body seizing up to his eyeballs, only his eyeballs could move, but maybe his mouth, he could feel the dirt in his mouth, yes, his mouth. Another soldier weeping, pissing his pants, a skinny kid shouting, \"God help me!\" crawling under the artillery, dragging guys, dead guys, barely alive guys, dragging Lieutenant Dole, who was way too big, way too heavy, so the skinny kid rolled Lieutenant Dole like a sack of sand, over, over, blood pouring out, down into a ravine. In and out of consciousness for six more hours on the bloody battlefield, Bob Dole's mind went home, to Russell, Kansas, running up Maple Street.\u00A0I always run. I'm running track in school. Hey, Dad, I think we have a good chance of going to state in football this year. I see Spitzy, our little white dog. Spitzy, what are you doing out in this kind of weather?\n\n \u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n I ask if\u00A0he ever thought about what the country would have been like if he'd been president.\n\n \"I've thought about it, not a lot, but I thought my relationship with Congress\u2014the Democrats and Republicans\u2014would help me get some things done. Not everything, but at least they'd be willing to try.\"\n\n Bipartisan leadership, he tells me, was not exceedingly complicated. \"We'd meet on an issue. If we could work it out, we'd work it out. If it wasn't possible, we'd have a vote.\"\n\n Done.\u00A0\n\n \"We had our problems,\" he says. \"It wasn't softball. But it never, I recall, became personal. It never was pointing a finger at somebody and saying something that should have been unsaid. We kept our word.\n\n \"I really thought, with my background growing up, and my service, and all that, I thought it would be enough for the presidency,\" he says. \"But... It sure was enough when I ran for Congress.\" He reminisces about those good old campaign days, serving Dole pineapple juice to get his name out there, and a singing quartet. \"It wasn't so much about money then.\u00A0\n\n \"The president says he's going to raise a billion dollars. A\u00A0billion dollars. I assume Romney will spend some of his personal fortune plus corporate donations to his super PAC. I mean, it's out of control now.\"\n\n I think perhaps we'll linger here, get worked up about how big money, really big money, has corrupted presidential politics, and perhaps join in a moment of sorrow about how America is going to hell in a handbasket.\n\n But no. That is not Bob Dole's bag. \"Be a doer, not a stewer,\" that's his motto. He's a soda jerk from Russell, Kansas, where you served milkshakes, cheered the people up.\u00A0\n\n \"Have you been out to the memorial?\" he asks me.\u00A0\n\n I tell him yes, I have, and his face opens like a sudden begonia bloom, a movie-star smile, gleaming charm and invitation.\u00A0\n\n The World War II Memorial, at the eastern end of the Reflecting Pool on the Mall, was opened a long time after the end of the war. A long darn time, in 2004. Granite pillars, arches, 4,048 gold stars, each representing one hundred American war dead. It was a big deal to Dole, who led the charge to make it happen.\u00A0\n\n \"Now they bring in guys from all over the country to see it,\" he says. The Honor Flight Network shuttles any vet who wants to visit the memorials for free, about 80,000 so far. Dole likes to greet them.\u00A0\n\n \"I received a letter from a veteran who said, 'You know, I was down\u2014' let's see, how did he say it\u2014'I was down and depressed and felt I'd never done anything, and then I came on one of the flights, and it made me feel good, kind of restored my dignity. I did contribute something.' You don't have to be shot at to serve your nation. He said his daughters were going to be proud of this new man. Just that one little trip saved this poor soul.\"\n\n I congratulate Bob Dole on the memorial, making the point that it seems hard for people to get anything done in Washington these days.\n\n He's leaning off to his right, sagging in the direction of his missing shoulder. He used to wear a shoulder pad. I don't think he has it on. Senator Elizabeth Dole, his wife, told me he used hidden Velcro under the flap of his already-buttoned shirts so that he could easily slip it on each morning.\u00A0Isn't that clever?\u00A0It speeds things up. She said it takes him hours to get dressed each morning. Hours.\u00A0Help? He would never accept help. Oh my, never.\u00A0\n\n \u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n Bob Dole\u00A0is not a bitter man. That part is jarring. His life was hard. His life was all heavy lifting and dropping, lifting and dropping. The regret hadn't jelled into anger.\u00A0\n\n There's a plaque on the windowsill.\u00A0YOU'LL NEVER WALK ALONE, it says, and I ask him about it.\n\n He doesn't point, doesn't even crane his neck; all his motions are in his eyes. \"It's a song,\" he says. \"I played it I don't know how many, a hundred times. Drove my mother crazy. It fits. If you listen to the words, it fits.\"\n\n Bob Dole is not a romantic, at least not an immediate one. Bob Dole is not one to waste a lot of time on metaphor. When he heard Sinatra croon,\u00A0You'll never walk alone, he heard, well,\u00A0walk. Alone. He was a 22-year-old mangled soldier, sitting in a wheelchair that his arms could not even push, and he would listen to that song, think, and concentrate. \u00A0\n\n If I kept struggling to make my legs move, he would write, later,\u00A0to put one foot in front of the other... All of heaven would help me; my upbringing would help, my grandparents, schoolteachers, athletic team coaches, university professors, my boot camp sergeants...\u00A0\n\n Dole spent three years in hospitals before emerging with a body that basically worked, minus a kidney, minus a shoulder, minus a functioning right arm. His left arm worked, but just two fingers on that hand worked, and thus empowered, unable to so much as write lecture notes, he trained his brain to memorize, and in time he earned a B.A. and a law degree, both magna cum laude.\u00A0Don't complain. Push forward. Don't dwell on it.\u00A0\"Be a doer, not a stewer!\" Years and years later, when he ran for the Republican nomination for president against George H. W. Bush in 1988, it bothered him to see those photos of Bush tromping all athletically through New Hampshire, shoveling snow, pushing stranded cars to show himself a man of honest sweat and brawn. That part did bother him. And again in 1996 when he got the nomination, ran in the general, Clinton golfing, Clinton at the C&amp;amp;O Canal clearing deadwood, heave-ho'ing big logs. Bob Dole couldn't do any of that. Hell, he did not have the dexterity to pick up a Big Mac. He would never publicly appear...manly. He would never publicly expose his shrunken biceps. He would never himself look at his missing shoulder in the mirror, draping a towel over it when naked.\u00A0\n\n \"Have you been out to Walter Reed?\" he asks.\n\n He keeps steering our conversation here. To vets. Young vets, old vets, this war, that war\u2014they mix together, and keeping track stops mattering. He talks about an injured helicopter pilot, a Purple Heart, a matchmaking scheme to set up that fine man with a pretty therapist at Walter Reed. He talks about programs, programs for vets. When I met with Elizabeth Dole, she made sure I knew about his programs, programs for vets. She had programs, too. Between the two of them, it is programs, programs, programs. I imagine them sharing a lifetime of meals together, brainstorming programs. Commitment to a life of service\u2014does anyone in this age of cynicism and billion-dollar campaigns really mean it?\u00A0\n\n I thank Bob Dole for his time. He's sagging like noodles now, drooping so far over that I want to reach over and give him a helpful shove. Then again, I feel I should stand and salute.\u00A0\n\n NEVER NEVER NEVER GIVE UP\u00A0reads a plaque behind Dole.\u00A0\n\n I ask Bob Dole if he has a message for America.\u00A0\n\n \"Message for America,\" he says. He makes his lips tight, rubs them together, and his thick eyes wander around for some time.\u00A0\n\n \"Things are going to get better,\" he says. \"Be optimistic.\"\n\n Jeanne Marie Laskas\u00A0is a\u00A0GQ\u00A0correspondent."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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